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JAR OF 




MOUNT HYBLA 



BY LEIGH HUNT. 



ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD DOYLE. 



A NEW EDITION. 



LONDON : 
SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE, 

1870, 



1*7* 

ly Traniftr 



)< TO 

HOKACE SMITH, 

WHO, THOUGH HE SUPPRESSES THE PASTORALS WHICH HE WROTE 

IN HIS YOUTH, 

WILL RETAIN, AS LONG AS HE LIVES, 

A HEART OPEN TO EVERT NATURAL AND NOBLE IMPRESSION, 

THESE PAGES, 

WITHOUT HIS KNOWLEDGE, BUT CONFIDING IN HIS INDULGENCE, 
BT HIS EVER GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE FRIEND, 



LEIGH HUNT. 



a — 3 



CONTENTS. 



PAGB 

CHRISTMAS AND ITALY : or, A Prefatory Essay, showing 
the Extreme Fitness of this Book for the Season 1 



CHAPTER I. 
INTRODUCTORY. 

A BLUE JAR FROM SICILY, AND A BRASS JAR FROM THE " ARABIAN 

NIGHTS ; " AND WHAT CAME OUT OF EACH 25 

CHAPTER II. 
SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 

ISLAND OF SICILY, AND MOUNT .2ETNA. — STORIES OF TYPHOSUS, 
POLYPHEMUS, SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS, GLAUCUS AND SCYLLA, 
ALPHEUS AND ARETHUSA, THE SIRENS, AND THE RAPE OF 
PROSERPINE 34 

CHAPTER III. 
GLANCES AT ANCIENT SICILIAN HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. 

VICISSITUDES OF SICILIAN GOVERNMENT. — GLANCES AT PHALARIS, 
STESICHORUS, EMPEDOCLES, HIERO I., SIMONIDES, EPICHARMUS, 
DIONYSIUS I., DAMON AND PYTHIAS, DAMOCLES, DIONYSIUS II., 
DION, PLATO, AGATHOCLES, HANNIBAL, HIERO II., THEOCRITUS, 
ARCHIMEDES, MARCELLUS, VERRES ; AND PARTICULARS RELATING 
TO GELLIAS 58 



Ylll CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IV. 
THEOCBITUS. 

PAGE 
PASTORAL POETRY. — SPECIMENS OF THE STRENGTH AND COMIC 
HUMOUR OF THEOCRITUS — THE PRIZE-EIGHT BETWEEN POLLUX 
AND AMTCUS — THE STRACUSAN GOSSIPS 71 

CHAPTER V. 

THEOCBITUS.— (Concluded.) 

SPECIMENS OF THE PATHOS AND PASTORAL OF THEOCRITUS. — THE 
CYCLOPS IN LOVE. — POETICAL FEELING AMONG UNEDUCATED 
CLASSES IN THE SOUTH. — PASSAGES FROM THEOCRITUS'S FIRST 
IDYLL. — HIS VERSIFICATION AND MUSIC. — PASTORAL OF BION 
AND MOSCHUS 88 

CHAPTER VI. 
NORMAN TIMES— LEGEND OF KING ROBERT. 

HOW KING ROBERT OF SICILY WAS DISPOSSESSED OF HIS THRONE ; 
AND WHO SAT UPON IT. — HIS WRATH, SUFFERINGS, AND 
REPENTANCE 107 

CHAPTER VII. 
ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL. 

TASSO'S ERMINIA AMONG THE SHEPHERDS, AND ODE ON THE GOLDEN 
AGE. — GUARINI'S RETURN OF SPRING. — SHEPHERD'S VISION OF 
THE HUNDRED MAIDENS IN SPENSER. — "SAD SHEPHERD" OF 
BEN JONSON 123 

CHAPTER VIII. 
ENGLISH PASTORAL— (Continued) ; AND SCOTCH PASTORAL. 

FLETCHER'S " FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS." — PROBABLE REASON OF ITS 
NON-SUCCESS. — " COMUS " AND " LYCIDAS." — DR. JOHNSON'S 
" WORLD." — BURNS AND ALLAN RAMSAY 147 



CONTENTS. IX 

CHAPTER IX. 
ENGLISH PASTORAL.— (Concluded.) 

PAGE 
PASTOEALS OF WILLIAM BROWNE. — PASTORAL MEN: CERVANTES, 

BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER, COWLEY, THOMSON, SHENSTONE, ETC 162 

CHAPTER X. 

RETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT .ETNA. 

SUBJECT OP MOUNT .ETNA RESUMED : — ITS BEAUTIES — ITS HORRORS 
— REASON WHY PEOPLE ENDURE THEM. — LOVE-STORY OF AN 
EARTHQUAKE 177 

CHAPTER XI. 

BEES. 

THE BEAUTIFUL NEVER TO BE THANKED TOO MUCH, OR TO BE 
SUFFICIENTLY EXPRESSED. — BEES AND THEIR ELEGANCE. — 

THEIR ADVICE TO AN ITALIAN POET. WAXEN TAPERS. — A BEE 

DRAMA. — MASSACRES OF DRONES. — HUMAN PROGRESSION 198 

CHAPTER XII. 

MISCELLANEOUS FEELINGS RESPECTING SICILY, ITS 
MUSIC, ITS RELIGION, AND ITS MODERN POETRY. 

DANTE'S EVENING. — AVE MARIA OF BYRON. THE SICILIAN VESPERS. 

— NOTHING " INFERNAL " IN NATURE. — SICILIAN MARINER'S 

HYMN. INVOCATION FROM COLERIDGE. — PAGAN AND ROMAN 

CATHOLIC WORSHIP. — LATIN AND ITALIAN COUPLET. — WINTER'S 
" RATTO DI PROSERPINA." — A HINT ON ITALIAN AIRS. — BELLINI. 
MELI, THE MODERN THEOCRITUS. 211 



OVERFLOWINGS OP THE JAR. 

PAGE 

THE JOUBNEY TO THE FEAST (FBOM THEOCRITUS) 237 

ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF BION (FKOM MOSCHUS) 243 

THE SHIP OF HIEKO 248 

SEEENADES IN SICILY AND NAPLES 250 

SICILIAN BANDITTI IN THE YEAB 1770 255 

GOOD-NATUEED HOSPITALITY, AND FACETIOUS IGNOBANT OLD 

GENTLEMAN 260 

SPECIMEN OF HIGHEB SOCIETY 261 

POETICAL TUEN OF THE SICILIANS 263 

A MEETING OF ENGLISH AND SICILIAN DISHES ON CHEISTMAS-DAY. 265 



LIST OF ILLUSTKATIONS. 

DESIGNED AND DEAWN ON WOOD BY RICHARD DOYLE. 

PAGE 

A jab of honey from mount hybla (Frontispiece). 

THE FISHERMAN AND THE GENIE 25 

SICULO-SARACENIC JAR 33 

THE SIRENS AND ULYSSES 34 

THE RAPE OF PROSERPINE 53 

PRESIDING DEITY OF HYBLA, FROM A SICILIAN COIN 57 

INFANT PLATO AND THE BEES 58 

FAIRY AND BEE 70 

SHEPHERDESS AND FLOCK 71 

THEOCRITUS, FROM THE RECEIVED PORTRAIT OF HIM 87 

POLYPHEMUS 88 

SICILIAN PEASANT 106 

KING ROBERT AND THE ANGEL 107 

KING ROBERT, FROM A SICILIAN COIN 122 

SIR CALIDORE 123 

TASSO 146 

ELVES AND SQUIRRELS 147 

SHEPHERD AND DOG 161 

ENGLISH PASTORAL 162 

CHAUCER 176 

MOUNT .aSTNA 177 

CHARLES OF ANJOU, KING OF SICILY .' 197 

SICILIAN BEE-HIVES 198 

ENGLISH BEE-HIVES 210 

SICILIAN VESPERS 211 

MELI, FROM A MEDALLION 235 



V 




CHRISTMAS AND ITALY; 

OR, 

A PREFATORY ESSAY, SHOWING THE EXTREME FITNESS 
OF THIS BOOK FOR THE SEASON, 



TN one of the volumes of that celebrated French publica- 
tion, the Almanack des Gourmands, which sounds 
the depths of the merit of soups, and decides on the dis- 
tracting claims of the most affinitive relishes, there is 
a frontispiece presenting to the respectful eyes of the 
reader a " Jury of Tasters." They form a board of 
elderly gentlemen with the most thoughtful faces, and 
are in the act of chewing each his mouthful, and 
profoundly ruminating on its pretensions. Having 
seen but this single volume of the work, and that only 
for a short time (which we mention with becoming 



Yl CHRISTMAS AND ITALY. 

regret), we are not qualified to report its verdicts ; but 
one of them made an impression on us not to be 
forgotten. It ran as follows: — "With this sauce a 
man might eat his father/' 

Now, far are we, in the most ambitious moments 
of our honey-making, from aspiring at a judgment upon 
us like that ; — sad evidence of the excesses of imagina- 
tion into which the most serious intellects may be trans- 
ported, in consequence of giving way to their appetites. 
One of the especial parts of our vocation is to draw 
sweet out of bitter ; and the only association of ideas 
which these unfilial sages brought to our mind, was 
that of an equally searching, but far nobler set of 
judges, who, when this our Honey first made its appear- 
ance at the periodical table of Mr, Ainsworth, and was 
thence diffused over the country, exclaimed from all 
quarters, after the most benignant meditation, "With this 
sauce a man might swallow some of the bitterest morsels 
of life." " This is the condiment to sweeten every man's 
daily bread." "There is the right Christian aroma in the 
sacrificial part of the offering of these dulcitudes." 

We blush, of course, with the requisite modesty in 
repeating these approvals ; and, indeed, should blush 
a great deal more if we thought that the contents of our 
Jar (as far as they originate with ourselves) had any 
merit beyond such as might easily be competed with 



A PREFATORY ESSAY. o 

by thousands throughout the land, upon the strength 
of their own thoughts and good-will, assisted by a little 
reading and cheerfulness ; but the truth is,, that our 
friends in Cornhill, having purchased the stock in 
consequence of those approvals, and thinking it worth 
their while, after it had been clarified and augmented, 
to put it into elegant vehicles of their own, and so 
qualify it to be made into Christmas presents, we 
are desirous to show how fit it is for that purpose ; nay, 
how emphatically it would have been so considered in 
the " good old Christmas times." 

It is true, that besides the good old Christmas 
times, there are such things as good new Christmas 
times ; and in respect to the great object of both, we 
are heartily of opinion that the latter far surpass the 
former, and that no literary fare for the season ever 
came up to the substantial as well as exquisite food set 
forth for us in the pages of Chimes and Christmas 
Carols. They are nectar and ambrosia for the spirit 
in the humblest shapes of the flesh. They are the 
sermons of the morning rescued from the dead letter 
of mere assent and custom, reproduced with all the 
allurements of wit and pathos, and made contributory to 
the greatest practical workings of the time. And the time 
has no greater glory than the fact of the conversion of 
satire itself to a beneficent spirit, which (with a few 



4 CHRISTMAS AND ITALY. 

occasional deviations, that must be pardoned for habit's 
sake) it obviously and largely possesses, and which it 
will complete ere long, by an impartiality towards every 
rank and description of men. 

These exceptions to our claims being admitted, we 
shall grow bold on the strength of our candour ; and 
aver, that our Jar of Honey is eminently suited to almost 
all other old Christmas associations (of an unvulgar 
order), while at the same time it does not omit, if it 
does not prominently put forth, this modern one of the 
right Christian spirit ; as indeed, by the favour of the 
critics, has already been noticed. Christmas amuse- 
ments of old were a mixture of poetry, piety, revelry, 
superstition, story-telling, and masquing, particularly 
Pagan and Arcadian masquing; and here you have them 
all. But they were not confined to these. At no time 
does talk run freer on all subjects than at Christmas, 
because at no time are the animal spirits set more at 
liberty ; and hence no topic is baulked if it come upper- 
most, any more than it is in these pages. And as to 
the foreign part of our title, when Shakspeare wrote his 
Winter's Tale (and a Winter's Tale was emphatically a 
Christmas Tale) he laid the scene of it in the same 
country as that of our little Jar. Shakspeare' s Christ- 
mas Tale is a Sicilian tale, and it presents the same 
mixture as we do, of old Sicilian story and English 



A PREFATORY ESSAY. 5 

pastoral. To be exclusively English, was never the con- 
templation of any Christmas talk. No later than the 
other day, Coleridge wrote a play in professed imitation 
of the Winter's Tale. He calls it "Zapolya, a Christmas 
Tale," and the scene is laid in Illyria ; which, by the 
way, is that of Shakspeare's Twelfth- Night, another 
play of the season, for Twelfth-Night is included in 
Christmas. Indeed, if you would banish foreign matters 
from Christmas, you must banish Christmas itself. 
You must sweep away mince-pies, with their currants 
from Greece, their cloves and mace from the Spice 
Islands, and their peel of lemon from Sicily. You must 
abolish your plum-pudding, with its raisins from Malaga, 
your boar's head from Germany, chestnuts from Spain 
and France, oranges from Portugal, wines every one of 
them, except British, all your hot pickles, all your teas 
and coffees, your very twelfth-cake, with its sugar : nay, 
even the name of the season, to say nothing of things 
too reverend to be specified. You would not have a 
mahogany table to dine upon. Sixpence would not be 
left you to buy a cigar, nor a cigar to be bought ; and 
if you wished to console yourself with singing a carol, 
ten to one but the tune would be taken out of your 
mouth, being found to belong to Pergolese or Palestrina, 
or some other Italian inventor of the phrases of melody. 
Italian ! Why, Italy will be talked about this 



6 CHRISTMAS AND ITALY, 

Christmas at half the tables in England, with the Pope 
and Mr. Cobden at its head ; and we think we see our 
little Blue Jar the more valued accordingly. Mr. Cobden 
has returned from Italy, brimful, as such a man ought 
to be, of its beauties and merits. He himself will talk 
plentifully about it ; and others will talk, because he has 
talked already. The Duke of Devonshire has been in 
Italy. Lord John has an Envoy in Italy. Every 
reigning circle of private and public life has had its 
representative visitor in that country. Everybody, 
indeed, may be said to visit it every day in the news- 
papers, to see how the Pope and Keform are going on ; 
poor Sicily has been in trouble with its " Captain 
Komeo " (strange link of times past and present) ; and 
Mr. Cobden has the magnanimity to express his regret 
that he had not made himself a master, when he was 
3 r oung, of the language of the beautiful peninsula. 

Now, one of the great objects of the present writer, 
for many years past, has been to lure his readers into 
the love of other languages, particularly of this most 
beautiful of them all. It is for this reason he has 
scarcely ever quoted the most trivial expression from 
any one of them without giving a version of it ; knowing 
well, how many intelligent men there are who would enjoy 
the original, if they knew it, far better than many an 
accidental scholar, and who are therefore willing to have 



A PREFATORY ESSAY. 7 

the least glimpse of it afforded them. It has been well 
said, that " mankind will cease to quarrel with one 
another, when they understand one another/' Mr 
Cobden, in his entertaining and instructive speech at 
the Manchester Athenaeum, has told us how he was 
struck with this conviction during his tour. But he 
arrived at it before, by the intuition of a happy nature. 
Why, for his own delight, does he not make himself a 
master of the language he so admires ? He is a reader 
by the fireside ; and one hour's reading, per diem, would 
render such a man more intimate with it in the course 
of a year than nine-tenths of its masters in England. 
But perhaps he is such. At all events, he may have 
become acquainted with it sufficiently for enjoyment; 
as much, for instance, as ourselves ; more so, if he 
speaks it ; for though we read, well enough, most of the 
languages that we translate, we can speak them no 
better than just to make our way through Italy and 
France. We mention this, partly that we may not seem 
to know more than we do, and partly to encourage 
others to learn. A little hearty love is better in this, as 
in all other cases, than a heap of indifferent knowledge. 
We are ashamed to say, that we know less of Greek, in 
one sense of the word, than we did when young, and are 
obliged to look out more words in the dictionary ; for to 
a dictionary we are still forced to resort, though we love 



8 CHEISTMAS AND ITALY. 

the language next to Italian, and hold it in higher admi- 
ration. But then we know our ignorance better than we 
did at that time ; are more aware of beauties to be 
enjoyed, and nice meanings to be discovered; and the 
consequence is, that whenever we undertake to translate 
a passage from Greek, we take our love on one side of 
us, and our dictionary on the other, and before we set 
about it, make a point of sifting every possible meaning 
and root of meaning, not excepting those in words the 
most familiar to us, in order that not an atom of the 
writer's intention may be missed. We do not say, of 
course, that we always succeed in detecting it ; but it is 
not for want of painstaking. 

The labour we delight in, physicks pain. 

Now by a like respect for the good old maxim of " slow 
and sure," and by dint of doing a little, or even a very 
little, every day, there is no lover of poetry and beauty 
who in the course of a few months might not be as deep 
as a bee in some of the sweetest flowers of other 
languages ; and it is for readers of this sort that we 
have not only translated and commented on Greek and 
other passages in the book before us, but in some 
instances given intimations of the spirit in which we 
have studied them ; — being anxious to allure to the 
study such as can find time for it, and to give some 



A PREFATORY ESSAY. 9 

little taste of their exquisiteness to those who cannot. 
For all sorts of benefits lie in a knowledge of languages, 
both to men out of the world and men in it ; — all 
additions to the stock of profit and pleasure, — to the 
certainty of knowing (as the phrase is) " what to be at " 
on occasions where profitable information is required ; 
of not losing any advantage, either of relative or of 
positive gain ; of growing superior to debasing fears and 
to ignorant and inhuman assumptions ; and above all, of 
assisting the great cause of the advancement and 
mutual intercourse of all men, which shall put an end to 
narrow-minded ideas of profit and loss, and open up that 
moral, and intellectual, and cordial as well as com- 
mercial Free Trade, without which we should remain 
little better for ever than a parcel of ill -taught children, 
willing, if not able, to cheat one another in corners. 
But all this cannot be done, unless knowledge and taste 
go hand-in-hand ; or, in other words, unless we learn to 
perceive the finally pleasurable, as well as the inter- 
mediately profitable ; otherwise, when we come to the 
end of our gain, we shall be but at the beginning of a 
sense of our unfitness to enjoy it ; and this, too, after 
missing a thousand graces by the way. Supposing 
health, for instance, and other favourable circumstances, 
to have been on a par, which of any two men in the age 
of Shakspeare was the more capable of enjoying the 



10 CHEISTMAS AND ITALY. 

whole round of his Christmas holidays, — he who had 
plenty of money to disburse for them, but no taste for 
their plays and pageants beyond what was shared by 
everybody who had eyes and ears ; or he who understood 
all the beauties of their imagery and their allusions ; who 
saw their colours with the eye of a painter, and heard 
their words with the apprehension of a poet ; to whom 
the music was not a mere prettiness to patronize, or 
movement to beat time to, but an interweaving of 
shapes of grace and circles of harmony ; to whom gods 
indeed descended from heaven, and nymphs brought 
back ages of gold ; to whom terror itself was but a 
passing phase of the operation of good ; and by, as well 
as for, whom, some justice, however small, was thus 
done to that magnificence of sight and suggestiveness 
with which heaven has adorned the universe, and that 
tendency to hope the best of all things which no 
seeming contradiction can do away ? To feel thus is not 
only to be able to endure the perplexities presented to 
the mind by Christmas itself, its poor, and its polemics, 
but to pass the " flaming bounds " of telescope and 
microscope, and repose in serenities beyond the finite. 

We have been led into an unexpected strain of 
enthusiasm and exaltation ; but this is as natural to the 
season as a church-organ, or as the memory of the 
Sermon on the Mount. Christmas sees fair play to all 



A PREFATORY ESSAY. 11 

reasonable moods of mind, the cheerful being pre- 
dominant, as the height of reason. After church comes 
an interval, and after the interval dinner, which is a 
mixture of the serious and the lively ; solid as to the 
beef and pudding, but light as regards the laughter and 
the whipped syllabub. Then ensue pastimes for a 
succession of days, including Twelfth-Day, with reading 
of books in the morning, and cards and conversation at 
night ; the young chiefly being the players at the once 
courtly games of forfeits and "Bob," and the old the 
performers at whist and the wine-bottle. Our modern 
Christmas entertainments will not bear comparison for 
vigour of enjoyment with those of our ancestors before 
Cromwell's time, either out of doors or in. They have 
never recovered the blow given them by the invidious 
heaviness of the Puritans. But to make amends, we 
have refined on some of their pleasures ; have multiplied 
others, as in the case of the theatres ; and we possess 
an overflow of their own favourite reading, such as their 
poets might have envied us. Bare manuscripts have 
been set free in popular editions ; we read the stories 
which our ancestors used to tell, with thousands of new 
novels to boot ; Christmas alone brings with it a shower 
of gorgeous and sometimes admirable publications, as if 
flowers came pouring down with its snow ; and in fine, 
beloved reader, here is our (and your) Jar of Honey, full 



12 CHRISTMAS AND ITALY. 

of the sweet Paganism that was dear to the Shakspeares 
and Miltons, of the Pastoral which they loved also, of 
the right Christmas adventures of King Robert of Sicily, 
(which they perused under another title in the Gesta 
Romanorum,) of all sorts of good Italianate things, 
(then, as now, looked upon with wonderful curiosity and 
respect ; ) and finally, if loving wishes deceive us not, a 
sample and prelihation of that quintessential extract of 
the spirit of Christianity itself, the effect of which is to 
take away all doubt respecting the celestial balsam, and 
to make men wonder how they came to mistake for it 
anything containing the least taste of the fiery, the 
bitter, or the sour. 

If the great and good Pope now reigning (for such 
he seems to be, in spite of some official drawbacks) has 
goodness enough to feel the wish, and could ever find 
greatness enough in him to dare to venture the act, of 
summoning a new Council of the Church, that should 
set on its altar this pure and unadulterated attraction 
of all hearts, instead of the unseemly manufactures of 
Councils of Trent and Priests of St. Januarius, he 
would give St. Peter's its only final chance of continuing 
to be the throne of the Christian world, and of flourishing 
under the sweet and only desirable blossom, that shall 
have done some day for ever with its thorns. 

But to return from these altitudes. The story of 



A PREFATORY ESSAY, 13 

King Kobert, we beg leave to say, is an especial delight 
of our soul, and gave us some exquisite moments in the 
writing. How came Shakspeare to let such a subject 
escape him ? or Beaumont and Fletcher ? or Decker ? or 
any of the great and loving spirits that abounded in that 
romantic age ? It was extant in manuscript ; it 
abounded, under another name, in print ; it presented the 
most striking dramatic points ; extremes of passion were 
in the characters ; pride and its punishment were in 
it ; humility and its reward ; a court, a chapel, an angel ; 
pomp, music, satire, buffoonery, sublimity, tears. 
Fate ! give us a dozen years more life, and a lift in our 
faculties, immense ; and let us try still if even our own 
verses cannot do something with it. 

There is not, we will venture to say, a single portion 
of our Jar, which does not contain appropriate reading 
for Christmas. 

The first chapter concerns the Arabian Nights ; and 
every little boy knows that the Arabian Nights are read- 
ing for all seasons, particularly holidays. 

The second chapter is full of the Fairy Tales of 
Antiquity; things which people used to relate round 
their fires during the ancient Saturnalia, just as our 
ancestors used to do at Christmas, and as boys read 
them still. And the Saturnalia were not only, to the 
ancients, what the Christmas holidays are to us, but the 



14 CHRISTMAS AND ITALY. 

veritable parents and progenitors of those holidays, 
as every antiquary knows. It is doubtful whether 
Macrobius, who wrote a Saturnalia, or Christmas 
Holiday Book, of his time, was a Pagan or a Christian ; 
but, at all events, his book is full of every kind of 
miscellaneous reading and gossiping, from Scipio's 
Dream down to a scandalous anecdote and a disputed 
passage in Virgil. Such was the pastime, he tells us, at 
that season, of the best-informed circles at Rome. 

Our third chapter contains, among other Saturnalian 
subjects, the story of the truly Christmas-like personage, 
Gellias, one of the wittiest and most hospitable of enter- 
tainers, a noble-hearted merchant-prince, who kept seven 
hundred gallons of wine in his house, and was famous 
for making his workmen happy. 

Our fourth and fifth chapters, besides some Satur- 
nalian stories, include an account of an ancient holiday, 
full of gossip, and show, and leafy boughs, together with 
a vast deal of Pastoral, — a summer recollection, to which 
Christmas has always been fond of reverting, at least in 
books and among the poets ; probably on the principle 
of extremes meeting, and by a happy rule of contraries. 
It is observable how fond we are at Christmas of what 
our forefathers used to call " greens," that is to say, 
boughs and flowers and everything which can force the 
summer, as it were, to remain with us by our firesides. 



A PREFATORY ESSAY. 15 

The sixth chapter is our beloved subject, the story of 
King Kobert aforesaid. 

The seventh brings us, through Italian Pastoral, to 
the Christmas poetical entertainments of our ancestors. 

In the eighth and ninth we are in the Old English 
Poetical Works. In the tenth at Mount ./Etna with its 
stories. In the eleventh with the Bees. In the 
twelfth with the musical services of the Church, with 
cheerful pieties of all sorts, and with the jovial Sicilian 
poet, Meli, one of the most universal of men. 

Some persons have fancied that our book would be 
too learned ! The most unlearned of such readers as we 
hope to possess will see what a notion this is, and to 
what plain English all our Greek and Latin has turned. 
We have the greatest contempt for learning, merely so 
called ; together with the greatest respect for it, when it 
sees through the dead letter of time and words into the 
spirit that concerns all ages and all descriptions of men. 
Every clever unlearned man in England, rich and poor, 
if we had the magic to do it, should be gifted to-morrow 
with all the learning that would adorn and endear his 
commerce to him, his agriculture, and the poorest 
flower-pot at his window. It would satisfy the longings 
that are born with such a man, and are natural to his 
powers ; and would enable him, while he no longer 
envied such right parliamentary quoters of Virgil as 



16 CHRISTMAS AND ITALY. 

the Minister, or Macaulay, or Sir Robert, or Brougham, 
or Lord Ellesmere, or Lord Morpeth, or Fox, to laugh 
at such educated ignoramuses as A, B, and C, who, 
though the classics were beaten into their heads at 
school, have no more real taste for what they quote, than 
the wall has for the pictures that are hung upon it with 
nail and hammer. 

Spirit is everything, and letter is nothing; except 
inasmuch as it is a vehicle for spirit. " The letter 
killeth, but the spirit giveth life." A learned quotation 
is as ridiculous in some peoples' mouths, as a flower 
would be stuck in the mouth of a barber's block. What 
would the best claret be to one that could not perceive 
the odour of it ? or the nicest of mince-pies, or college- 
puddings, to a mouth that had no taste ? We are but dull 
ourselves in such matters (the more's the pity), and would 
fain share, when at table, the nicest discernments of sharp 
and sweet, possessed by the luckier palates around us ; 
but we should only laugh at the poor devil of a 
pretender, who, with nothing but a palate of silver, and 
no taste at all, should affect to emulate the Almanack des 
Gourmands, and give his opinion of the contending sauces. 

May we take, by the way, a Saturnalian liberty, and 
ask Members of Parliament why they quote no language 
but Latin, and in Latin no writers but Virgil and Horace ? 
We believe there is an occasional venture on Lucretius, 



A PREFATORY ESSAY, 17 

and perhaps on Juvenal. Also, two passages from Ovid, 
one in praise of the Fine Arts, and another about 
preferring wrong pursuits to right perceptions. But 
French has lately been thought worthy of cultivation, 
even at public schools ; almost every man of rank speaks 
it; and Italian is an ordinary accomplishment. Ariosto, 
Berni, and others, would supply an admirable crop 
of new parliamentary quotations ; or, if there was a fear 
of the delicacy of the pronunciation, what hinders us 
from being refreshed with something from Moliere, La 
Fontaine, Pascal, or a hundred other wits and thinkers 
among our gallant neighbours ? New paths of quotation 
are due to railroads and Free Trade. There would be 
a sort of extension of Parliament itself into Paris and 
Rome, if we occasionally spoke the languages of those 
illustrious cities. France and Italy would be pleased ; 
books benefited ; politics smoothed ; intercourse glad- 
dened and enlarged. Even a bit of Greek might be 
ventured upon, if short and sweet ; and Mr. Hume feel 
relieved in hearing (on the authority of the philosophic 
Hesiod) that "half" was "better than the whole" 
(ttAeov r)jUi<TU ttclvtoq). 

The reverend maxim we have quoted respecting spirit 
and letter reminds us of a little Christmas story which 
has never been in print, and which, in accordance with 
the season, we shall take this opportunity of relating. 

2 



18 CHRISTMAS AND ITALY. 

It was brought to our recollection by meeting with the 
following exquisite passage from Bacon : — 

" As those wines which flow from the first treading 
of the grape are sweeter and better than those forced out 
by the press, which gives them the roughness of the husk 
and the stone, so are those doctrines best and sweetest 
which flow from a gentle crush of the Scriptures, and are 
not wrung into controversies and commonplaces." 

That metaphor of the " husk " is one that has 
haunted us (so to speak), in connexion with the subject 
here alluded to, for half our lives ; not suggested, we 
beg leave to say, by the great philosopher — (qualified 
though he be to suggest hundreds of things to us 
beyond our powers of origination) — but by the greater 
force of the necessity of admitting evil and reconciling 
it to good. And in that point of view the husk we allude 
to is nobler than Bacon's, or, at least, than what seems 
to have been in his construction of the word ; for we 
took it in the light of a necessary enclosure and safe- 
guard of a future bud. But to drop this collateral re- 
miniscence, and come to our story. It is entitled 

THE ELIXIR AND THE VIALS. 

Once on a time there was a dispute respecting the 
possession of a certain elixir, called by some Flower of 



A PKEFATOKY ESSAY. 19 

Thorn, by others Spirit of Lily, by others Spirit of Love, 
and by others various other names not necessary to 
mention, but agreed by all to produce the most wonder- 
ful effects on the mind, of peace and benevolence. The 
parties who laid claim to the glory and emoluments of 
this possession, said it was kept in a particular kind of 
vial distinguishable from every other, and belonging 
exclusively to one single proprietor ; and each claimant 
declared, nay swore, that he was that one. Indeed, it 
was remarkable, that for persons valuing themselves on 
the possession of an essence, or spirit, producing such 
gentle effects, they were, most of them, wonderfully given 
to swearing, not hesitating to use the most extraordinary 
oaths, both in assertion of their own claims, and in con- 
demnation of those of the rest. One of these gentlemen, 
holding up his vial, which was a very pretty thing to 

look at, exclaimed that every man might be, nay, 

was (we do not like to repeat the word), who did 

not see plainly that that was the only Spirit. Another 
uttered the very same threats, though he held up a vial 
of a totally different appearance. The case was the 
same with a third, a fourth, and a fifth, nay, with a 
fiftieth. There was nothing to be seen but a flourish- 
ing of vials, and nothing to be heard but a storm of 
voices. At length, from words (as might be expected 
of such words) they proceeded to blows ; and what was 



20 CHRISTMAS AND ITALY. 

very astonishing, they were so moved and provoked out 
of their wits as to convert their respective vials into 
weapons of offence, and so absolutely endeavour to fight 
it out with the fragile materials. 

The consequences may be guessed. Not only were 
heads broken, but the vials also ; and not only did the 
spirit in the vials evaporate, but by the fury of the com- 
batants, both before and after the breakage, it became 
manifest that no such thing as a spirit producing the 
effects they pretended, had been in the vials at all. 

The scene ended with the laughter of the spectators ; 
and worse consequences might have ensued, but for the 
appearance of a third set of persons bringing forward 
another vial. It was totally unlike all the former, 
except in one part of it ; and this part, which was of the 
real crystal which the others only pretended to be, was 
said to contain, and did absolutely contain, the veritable 
peace-making elixir, as was proved by a very simple but 
incontrovertible circumstance ; namely, the peace-making 
itself. The proprietors neither swore, nor threatened, 
nor fought, nor tried to identify the vial with its contents. 
They proved the effect of those contents upon themselves 
by the friendliest behaviour towards all parties present ; 
and though they had a long and difficult task to induce 
their rivals to taste it, yet no sooner had they done so, 
than the whole place became a scene of the most 



A PREFATORY ESSAY. 21 

enchanting reasonableness and serenity. Everybody 
embraced bis neighbour with the kindest words, and the 
combatants themselves did not scruple to wonder how 
they could have missed perceiving the presence of an 
odour so sweet, so unadulterated, so unquestionable, so 
tranquillizing, and so divine. 

This story is not so good as Eobert of Sicily, or as 
one that we shall relate presently ; but it is not inferior 
to either in the conclusions that may be drawn from it ; 
and assuredly (except from the edification to be drawn 
from scandals themselves) it is better than the histories 
of all the controversies that have agitated the schools 
of East and West. As to that of the Sicilian King, we 
are so fond of it that we cannot help taking the oppor- 
tunity it affords us of thanking the young artist who has 
illustrated it, and who, after distinguishing himself with 
the public for his humour, has shown in these pages so 
much promise of a more serious order. He has not 
chosen to give his angel much bodily substance ; perhaps 
the better to intimate the spiritual nature of the being, 
and give the more supernatural solemnity to his departure. 
But nobody can doubt the solidity which accompanies 
the grace of King Kobert ; and the royal penitent has 
been judiciously reinvested with the garb of his rank, 
the moment he resumes his personal identity. We must 



22 CHRISTMAS AND ITALY. 

be allowed also to express our sense of the Poussin-like 
figure of Polyphemus at page 88, with his lumpish but 
not ungraceful shoulders (fit symbols of the heaviness of 
his mind) ; nor can we omit noticing the truly pastoral 
grace and simplicity of the Shepherdess at page 71, who 
is leading a flock full of nature and movement ; and we 
are particularly thankful for the fidelity with which the 
artist has transferred to paper the sensitive and benig- 
nant profile of the Sicilian poet Meli, a cast of a medallion 
of whose likeness we have the good fortune to possess. 
Mr. Doyle, throughout his drawings, has shown great 
attention to costume and other such proprieties ; one of 
the evidences of that regard for truth, without which no 
art of any kind can ever come to perfection. 

We shall conclude this article with a brief Christmas 
story to which there is an allusion in the one above 
mentioned, and which we hold to be worth, at least, 
some nine hundred and forty thousand sermons. It is 
entitled 

THE ELEVEN COMMANDMENTS. 

A certain bishop who lived some hundred years ago, 
and who was very unlike what is reported of her Majesty's 
new almoner ; also very unlike the Christian bishops of 
old, before titles were invented for them ; very unlike 
Fenelon too, who nevertheless had plenty of titles ; very 



A PREFATOBY ESSAY. Zo 

unlike St. Francis de Sales, who was for talking nothing 
but "roses;" very unlike St. Vincent de Paul, who 
founded the Sisterhood of Charity ; very unlike Eundle, 
who " had a heart," and Berkeley, who had " every virtue 
under heaven," and that other exquisite bishop (we 
blush to have forgotten his name), who was grieved to 
find that he had a hundred pounds at his banker's when 
the season had been so bad for the poor ; — this highly 
unresembling bishop, who, nevertheless, was like too 
many of his brethren, — that is to say, in times past (for 
there is no bishop now, at least in any quarter of 
England, who is not remarkable for meekness, and does 
not make a point of turning his right cheek to be smitten, 
the moment you have smitten his left) ; — this unepiscopal, 
and yet not impossible bishop, we say, was once accosted, 
during a severe Christmas, by a Parson Adams kind of 
inferior clergyman, and told a long story of the wants of 
certain poor people, of whose cases his lordship was un- 
aware. What the dialogue was, which led to the remark 
we are about to mention, the reporters of the circumstance 
do not appear to have ascertained ; but it seems that, the 
representations growing stronger and stronger on one 
side, and the determination to pay no attention to them 
acquiring proportionate vigour on the other, the clergy- 
man was moved to tell the bishop that his lordship did 
not understand his " eleven commandments." 



24 



CHRISTMAS AND ITALY, 



" Eleven commandments ! " cried the bishop ; " why, 
fellow, you are drunk. Who ever heard of an eleventh 
commandment ? Depart, or you shall be put in the 
stocks." 

"Put thine own pride and cruelty in the stocks," 
retorted the good priest, angered beyond his Christian 
patience, and preparing to return to the sufferers for 
whom he had pleaded in vain. " I say there are eleven 
commandments, not ten, and that it were well for such 
flocks as you govern, if it were added, as it ought to be, 
to the others over the tables in church. Does your lord- 
ship remember — do you in fact know anything at all of 
Him who came on earth to do good to the poor and 
woeful, and who said, ' Behold, I give unto you a new 
commandment, Love one another?' " 




JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 



CHAPTEK I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 




a blue jar from sicily, 
and a brass jar 
from the ''arabian 
nights;" and what 
came out of each. 



pASSINGoneday 

by the shop of 
Messrs. Fortnuro. and 
Mason in Piccadilly, we 
beheld in the window a 
little blue jar, labelled, 
"Sicilian Honey." — It 
was a jar of very humble 
pretensions, if estimated 
according to its price in 
the market. Perhaps it 
might have been worth, 
as a piece of ware, about 



26 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

threepence ; and, contents and all, its price did not 
exceed eigliteenpence. People who condescend to look 
at nothing but what is costly, and who, being worth 
a vast deal of money at their bankers', are not aware that 
they are poor devils as men, would have infallibly 
despised it ; or, at the very utmost, they would have 
associated it in their minds with nothing but the 
confectioner or the store-room. On the other hand, it 
might have reminded a Cavendish or a Gower of his 
Titians and Correggios ; and a Rogers would surely 
have looked twice at it, for the sake of his Stothard and 
his Italy. And the poet and the noble dukes would 
have been right, not only in the spirit of their 
recollections, but to the very letter ; for the deep 
beautiful blue was the same identical blue, the result of 
the same mineral, by which such an effect is retained in 
old pictures ; and the shape of the jar was as classical 
as that of many a vase from the antique. Antiquity, 
indeed, possessed an abundance of precisely such jars. 
Furthermore, when you held the jar in the sun, a spot 
of insufferable radiance came in the middle of its cheek, 
like a very laugh of light. Then it contained honey — a 
thing which strikes the dullest imaginations with a sense 
of sweetness and the flowers; and in addition to the 
word. " honey " outside, was the word " Sicilian " — a 
very musical and meminiscent word. 



INTRODUCTORY. 27 

Now in consequence of this word " Sicilian," by a 
certain magical process, not unlike that of the seal of 
the mighty Solomon, which could put an enormous 
quantity of spirit into a wonderfully small vessel, the 
inside of our blue jar (for be sure we bought it) became 
enriched, beyond its honey, to an extent which would 
appear incredible to any readers but such as we have the 
honour to address, doubtless the most intelligent of 
their race. 

To introduce it, however, even to them, in a manner 
befitting their judgment, it is proper that we call to 
their recollection the history of a previous jar of their 
acquaintance, to which the foregoing paragraph contains 
an allusion. 

They will be pleased to call to mind that eighteen 
hundred years after the death of Solomon, and during 
the reign of the King of the Black Isles, who was 
(literally) half petrified by the conduct of his wife, a 
certain fisherman, after throwing his nets to no 
purpose, and beginning to be in despair, succeeded in 
catching a jar of brass. The brass, to be sure, seemed 
the only valuable thing about the jar ; but the fisherman 
thought he could, at least, sell it for old metal. Find- 
ing, however, that it was very heavy, and furthermore 
closed with a seal, he wisely resolved to open it first, and 
see what could be got out of it. 



lib A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

He therefore took a knife — (we quote from Mr. 
Torrens's Arabian Nights, not out of disregard for that 
other interesting version by our excellent friend Mr. Lane, 
but we have lent his first volume, and Galland does not 
contain the whole passage ; he seems to have thought it 
would frighten the ladies of his day) — the fisherman, 
therefore, "took a knife," says Mr. Torrens, "and 
worked at the tin cover till he had separated it from the 
jar ; and he put it down by his side on the ground. 
Then he shook the jar, to tumble out whatever might be 
in it, and found in it not a thing. So he marvelled 
with extreme amazement. But presently there came 
out of the jar a vapour, and it rose up towards the 
heavens, and reached along the face of the earth ; and 
after this, the vapour reached its height, and condensed, 
and became compact, and waved tremulously, and 
became an Ufreet (evil spirit), his head in the clouds, 
and his foot on the soil, his head like a dome, his hand 
like a harrow, his two legs like pillars, his mouth like a 
pit, his teeth like large stones, and his nostrils like 
basins, and his eyes were two lamps, austere and 
louring. Now, when the fisherman saw that Ufreet, his 
muscles shivered, and his teeth chattered, and- his 
palate teas dried uj), and he knew not where he was." 

This, by the way, is a fine horrible picture, and very 
like an Ufreet ; as anybody must know, who is intimate 



INTRODUCTORY. 29 

with that delicate generation. We are acquainted with 
nothing that beats it in its way, except the description 
of another in the Baliar Danush, who, while sleeping 
on the ground, draws the pebbles towards hirn with his 
breath, and sends them back again as it goes forth ; 
though a little further on, in the Arabian Nights, is 
an Ufreet of a most accomplished ugliness — namely, 
" the lord of all that is detestable to look at ! " What a 
jurisdiction ! And the " lord " too ! Fancy a viscount 
of that description. 

The fright and astonishment conceived by the fisher- 
man at the taste thus given him of this highly concen- 
trated spirit of Jinn (for such is the generic Eastern 
term for the order to which the Ufreet belongs) were 
not, how T ever, the only things he got out of his jar. An 
incarceration of eighteen hundred years at the bottom of 
the ocean, under the seal of the mighty Solomon, had 
taught its prisoner a little more respect for that kind of 
detainder than he had been wont to exhibit ; the fisher- 
man exacted from him an oath of good treatment in the 
event of his being set free ; and the consequence was, that 
after the adventures of the coloured fish, of the appearance 
of the lady out of the wall, and of the semi-petrifaction of 
the King of the Black Islands with his lonely voice, our 
piscatory friend is put in possession of his majesty's 
throne. So here is an Ufreet as high as the clouds, 



30 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

fish that would have delighted Titian, (they were blue, 
white, yellow, and red,) a lady, full-dressed, issuing out 
of a kitchen wall, a king half-turned to stone by his 
wife, a throne given to a fisherman, and half-a-dozen 
other phenomena, all resulting from one poor brazen 
jar, into which when the fisherman first looked, he saw 
nothing in it. 

A brass jar by the ocean's brim 

A yellow brass jar was to him, 

And it was nothing more. 

Now we might have expected as little from our 
earthern jar, as the future monarch did from his jar 
of metal, had not some circumstances in our life made 
us acquainted with the philosophy and occult properties 
of jars ; but such having been the case, no lover of the 
Arabian Nights (which is another term for a reader 
with a tendency to the universal) will be surprised at 
the quantity and magnitude of the things that arose 
before our eyes out of the little blue jar in the window 
of Messrs. Fortnum and Mason. 

" Sicilian Honey." — We had no sooner read those 
words, than Theocritus rose before us, with all his 
poetry. 

Then Sicily arose — the whole island — particularly 
Mount iEtna. Then Mount Hybla, with its bees. 

Then Kucellai (the Italian poet of the bees) and his 



INTRODUCTORY. 81 

predecessor Virgil, and Acis and Galatea, and Polyphe- 
mus, a pagan Ufreet, but mild — mitigated by love, as 
Theocritus has painted him. 

Then the Odyssey, with the giant in his fiercer days, 
before he had sown his wild rocks ; and the Sirens ; and 
Scylla and Charybdis ; and Ovid ; and Alpheus and 
Arethusa ; and Proserpina, and the Vale of Enna — 
names, which bring before us whatever is blue in skies, 
and beautiful in flowers or in fiction. 

Then Pindar, and Plato, and Archimedes (who made 
enchantments real), and Cicero (who discovered his 
tomb), and the Arabs with their architecture, and the 
Normans with their gentlemen who were to found a 
sovereignty, and the beautiful story of King Eobert and 
the Angel, and the Sicilian Vespers (horribly so called), 
and the true Sicilian Vespers, the gentle "Ave Maria,'" 
closing every evening, as it does still, in peace instead 
of blood, and ascending from blue seas into blue heavens 
out of white-sailed boats. 

Item, Bellini, and his Neapolitan neighbour 
Paesiello. 

Item, the modern Theocritus, not undeservedly so 
called; to wit, the Abate Giovanni Meli, possibly of 
Grecian stock himself — for his name is the Greek as 
well as Sicilian for honey. 

Then, every other sort of pastoral poetry, Italian, 



32 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

and English, and Scotch — Tasso, and Guarini, and 
Fletcher, and Jonson, and William Browne, and Pope, 
and Allan Ramsay. 

Item, earthquakes, vines, convents, palm - trees, 
mulberries, pomegranates, aloes, citrons, rocks, gardens, 
banditti, pirates, furnaces under the sea, the most 
romantic landscapes and vegetation above it, guitars, 
lovers, serenades, and the never-to-be-too-often-men- 
tioned blue skies and blue waters, whose azure (on the 
concentrating Solomon-seal principle) appeared to be 
specially represented by our little blue jar. 

Lastly, the sweetness, the melancholy, the birth, 
the life, the death, the fugitive evil, the constant good, 
the threatening iEtna making every moment of life 
precious, and the moment of life so precious, and 
breathing such a pure atmosphere, as to enable fear 
itself to laugh at, nay, to love the threatening iEtna, 
and play with it as with a great planetary lion to which 
it has become used. 

From all this heap of things, or any portion of them, 
or anything which they may suggest, we propose, as 
from so many different flowers, to furnish our Jar of 
Honey, careless whether the flower be sweet or bitter, 
provided the result (with the help of his good-will) be 
not un-sweet to the reader. For honey itself is not 
gathered from sweet flowers only ; neither can much of 



INTRODUCTORY. 38 

it be eaten without a qualification of its dulcitude with 
some plainer food. It can hardly be supposed to be as 
sweet to the bees themselves, as it is to us. Evil is so 
made to wait upon good in this world — to quicken it by 
alarm, to brighten it by contrast, and render it sympa- 
thetic by suffering — that although there is quite enough 
superabundance of it to incite us to its diminution 
(Nature herself impelling us to do so), yet tears have 
their delight, as well as laughter ; and laughter itself 
is admonished by tears and pain not to be too excessive. 
Laughter has occasioned death : — tears have saved more 
than life. The readers, therefore, will not suppose that 
we intend (supposing even that we were able) to cloy 
them with sweets. We hope that they will occasionally 
look very grave over their honey. We should not be 
disconcerted, if some bright eyes even shed tears 
over it. 




34 



A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 



CHAPTEE II. 
SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 

ISLAND OF SICILY, AND MOUNT ^TNA. STOKIES OF TYPHCEUS, 

POLYPHEMUS, SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS, GLAUCUS AND SCYLLA, 
ALPHEUS AND ARETHUSA, THE SIRENS, AND THE RAPE OF 
PROSERPINE. 




AS it is good to have a 
plan and system in 
everything, whatever may 
be the miscellaneousness 
of its nature, we shall 
treat of our subjects in 
chronological order, be- 
ginning with the mythological times of Sicily, and ending 
with its latest modern poet. 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 35 

Sicily is an island in the Mediterranean Sea, at the 
foot of Italy, about half the size of England, and inhabited 
by a population a fifth less than that of London. Its 
shape is so regularly three-cornered, that Triangle or 
Triple-point (Trinacria) was one of its ancient names. 
Mount iEtna stands on the east, in one of these angles. 
The coast is very rocky and romantic ; the interior is a 
combination of rugged mountains and the loveliest 
plains ; and the soil is so fertile in corn as well as other 
productions, that Sicily has been called the granary of 
Europe. The inhabitants are badly governed, and there 
is great poverty among them; but movements have 
taken place of late years that indicate advancement ; 
and the Sicilians, meantime, have all those helps to 
endurance (perhaps too many) which result from spright- 
liness of character, united with complexional indolence. 
They are good-natured but irritable; have more indepen- 
dence of spirit than their neighbours the Neapolitans ; 
and are still a pastoral people as of old, making the 
most of their valleys and their Mount iEtna ; not by 
activity, but by pipe and song, and superstition. 

With this link of their newest and their oldest 
history we shall begin our Sicilian memories from the 
beginning. 

Did iEtna exist before the human race ? Was it, for 
ages, a great lonely earth-monster, sitting by the sea 



36 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

with his rugged woody shoulders and ghastly crown ; 
now silent and quiet for centuries, like a basking giant ; 
now roaring to the antediluvian skies ; vomiting forth 
fire and smoke ; drivelling with lava ; then silent again 
as before ; alternately destroying and nourishing the 
transitory races of analogous gigantic creatures, mam- 
moths, and mastodons, which preceded nobler humanity? 
Was it produced all at once by some tremendous burst 
of earth and ocean ? — some convulsion, of which the like 
has never since been known, — perhaps with all Sicily 
hanging at its root : or did it grow, like other earthly 
productions, by its own energies and the accumulations 
of time ? In whatever way it originated, and however 
the huge wonder may have behaved itself at any period, 
quietly or tremendously, nobody can doubt that the 
creature is a benevolent creature, — one of the securities 
of the peaceful and profitable existence of the far greater 
and more mysterious creature rolling in the shape of an 
orb round the sun in midst of its countless like, and 
carrying us all along with it in our respective busy 
inattentions. We do not presume to inquire how the 
necessity for any such evil mode of good arose. Suffice 
for us, that the evil itself works to a good purpose ; that 
the earth, apparently, could not exist without it ; 
that Nature has adorned it with beauty which is another 
good, with fertility which is another, with grandeur 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY, 37 

which is another, elevating the mind ; and that if human 
beings prefer risking its neighbourhood with all its 
occasional calamities, to going and living elsewhere, those 
calamities are not of its own willing, nor of any unavoid- 
able necessity, nor perhaps will exist always. Suppose 
iEtna should some day again be left to its solitude, and 
people resolve to be burnt and buried alive no longer ? 
What a pilgrimage would the mountain be then ! What 
a thought for the poet and the philosopher ! What a 
visit for those who take delight in the borders of fear 
and terror, and who would love to interrogate Nature the 
more for the loneliness of her sanctuary ! 

The first modes of organized life which make their 
appearance in these remotest ages of Sicily, are of 
course fabulous modes, — fabulous, but like all fables, 
symbolical of truth; and what is better than mere 
truth, of truths poetical. The mythic portion of 
the history of Sicily is like its region — small, rich, 
lovely, and terrible. It may be said to consist wholly 
of the stories of Typhosus, of Polyphemus and the 
Cyclopes, of Scylla and Charybdis, of the Sirens, of 
the Eape of Proserpine, of Alpheus and Arethusa, 
of Acis and Galatea — names, which have become 
music in the ears of mankind. 

What ! is Typhosus a musical name ? and Poly- 
phemus and the Cyclopes ? Yes, of the grander sort ; 



38 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

organ-like ; the bass for the treble of the Sirens ; the 
gloom and terror, along which floats away, through 
vine and almond, the lovely murmur of Alpheus and 
Arethusa. 

We shall not explain away these beautiful fables 
into allegory, physics, or any other kind of ungrateful 
and half-witted prose. They may have had the dullest 
sources, for aught we know to the contrary, as beautiful 
streams may have their fountains in the dullest places, 
or delightful children unaccountably issue from the 
dullest progenitors ; but there they were of old, in 
Sicily ; and here they are among us to this day ; in 
poets' books ; in painters' colours ; among the delights 
of every cultivated mind ; true as anything else that is 
known by its effects; spiritual creatures, living and 
breathing in the enchanted regions of the imagination. 
The poets took them in hand from infancy, and made 
them the real and immortal things they are. We shall 
not deny their analogy with beautiful or grand operations 
in Nature, as long as the mystery and poetry of those 
operations are kept in mind. Typhosus, or Typhon, for 
instance, may, if the etymologist pleases, be the Tifoon, 
or Dreadful Wind, of the Eastern seas ; or he may be 
the smoking of Mount iEtna (from rtyio to smoke) ; or 
he may comprehend both meanings in one word, derived 
from some primitive root ; for as long as his cause 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 39 

remains a secret, and his effect is poetical, so long the 
spirit of the mystery may be embodied as imagination 
pleases. Suffice for us, that the thing is there, some- 
how. All that we object to in the natural or supernatural 
historians of such persons, is their stopping at mecha- 
nical and prosaical causes, and thinking they settle 
anything. 

This said personage Typhosus is, it must be owned, 
a tremendous fellow to begin stories with of beautiful 
Sicily; to put at the head of creations containing so 
much loveliness. He was a monster of monsters, 
brought forward by Earth as a last desperate resource 
in the quarrel of her Giants with the Gods. His 
stature reached the sky; he had a hundred dragons' 
heads, vomiting flames; and when it pleased him to 
express his dissatisfaction, there issued from these 
heads the roaring and shrieking of a hundred different 
animals ! Jupiter had as hard a task to conquer him 
as Amadis had with the Endriago.* A good report 
of the fight is to be found in Hesiod. Heaven trembled, 
and earth groaned, and ocean flashed with a ghastly 
radiance, as they lightened and thundered at one another. 
The king of the gods at length collected all his deity 
for one tremendous effort, and leaping upon his 

* See that beautiful book, Amadis of Gaul, vol. i. chap. 12, in 
the admirable translation by Southey. 



40 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

antagonist with his whole armoury of thunders, made 
his foaming mouth hiss in the blaze; the mountain 
hollows flashed fainter where he lay smitten ; the rocks 
dropped about him like melted lead ; and Jupiter tore 
up the whole island of Sicily, and flung it upon him, by 
way of detainer for ever. One promontory acted as a 
presser on one hand ; another on another ; a third on 
his legs ; and the crater of Mount iEtna was left him 
for a spiracle. There he lay in the time of Ovid, making 
the cities tremble as he turned ; and there he lies still, 
for all that Brydone, or Smyth, or even Monsieur 
Grourbillon has proved to the contrary ; though scep- 
ticism has attained to such a pitch in that quarter, that 
the only danger in earthquakes is now attributed to 
people's not being quick enough with displaying the 
veil of Saint Agatha. 

Compared with this cloud-capped enormity, our old 
friend Polyphemus (Many-voice), the ogre or Fee-Faw- 
Fum of antiquity, becomes a human being. lie and his 
one-eyed Cyclopes (Round- eyes), are the primitive in- 
habitants of Sicily, before men ploughed and reaped. 
They kept sheep and goats, and had an eye to business 
in the cannibal line ; though what it was that gave them 
their name, is not determined ; nor is it necessary to 
trouble the reader with the controversies on that point. 
Very huge fellows they were, beating Brobdingnagians to 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY, 41 

nothing. Horner describes Polyphemus as looking like 
a " woody hill." He kept Ulysses and his companions 
in his cave to eat them, just as his Oriental counterpart 
did Sinbad, or as the giants of our childhood proposed 
to feast on Jack ; and when Ulysses put out the eye of 
roaring Many -voice with a firebrand, and got off to sea, 
the blind monster sent some rocks after the ship, which 
remain stuck on the coast to this day. 

And yet, by the magic of love and sympathy, even 
Polyphemus has been rendered pathetic. Theocritus 
made him so with his poetry ; and Handel did as much 
for him in his musical version of the story, especially in 
those exquisite caressing passages between Acis and 
Galatea, (" The flocks shall leave the mountains," &c.,) 
which might fill the most amiable rival with torment. 
Acis (Acuteness) and Galatea {Milky) — (we like this 
fairy-tale restitution of the meanings of ancient names, 
the example of which was at first set, we believe, by Mr. 
Keightley) — forgot themselves, however, too far, when 
they made love before the very eyes of the rival ; — not the 
only instance, we fear, of similar provocation given by 
the vanity of happy lovers. We regret this ill-breeding 
the more on account of the monster's hopelessness ; and 
considering the little patience that was to be expected of 
him, almost pardon the rock which he sent on their 
ecstatic heads. 



42 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Gay's verses on this occasion would not have been 
unworthy of Theocritus : — 

Acis and Galatea. \_Duet.'] 

The flocks shall leave the mountains, 

The woods the turtle-dove, 
The nymphs forsake the fountains, 

Ere I forsake my love. 

Polyphemus. [Solo.] 

Torture ! fury ! rage ! despair ! 
I cannot, cannot, cannot bear. 

Acis and Galatea. 

Not showers to larks so pleasing, 

Nor sunshine to the bee ; 
Not sleep to toil so easing, 

As those dear smiles to me. 

Polyphemus hukls the rock. 

Fly swift, thou massy ruin, fly : 
Die, presumptuous Acis, die. 

Scylla and Charybdis, or Scylla and Glaucus rather, 
is a far more appalling story of jealousy. Scylla properly 
belongs to the opposite coast of Naples ; but as she and 
her fellow-monster Charybdis are usually named together, 
and the latter tenanted the Sicilian coast, and the strait 
between them was very narrow, she is not to be omitted 
in Sicilian fable. Charybdis (quasi Chalybdis, Hiding ? 
though some derive it from two words signifying to 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 43 

"gape" and "absorb") was a personage of a very 
unique sort, to wit, a female freebooter ; who, having 
stolen the oxen of Hercules, was condemned to be a whirl- 
pool, and suck ships into its gulf. Nevertheless she was 
a horror not to be compared with Scylla, though the 
latter was thought less dangerous. Mr. Keightley has 
so well told this story out of Homer, that we must 
repeat it in his words : — 

" Having escaped the Sirens, and shunned the 
Wandering Eocks, which Circe told him lay beyond the 
mead of these songsters, Odysseus (Ulysses) came to 
the terrific Scylla and Charybdis, between which the 
goddess had informed him his course lay. She said he 
would come to two lofty cliffs opposite each other, 
between which he must pass. One of these cliffs towers 
to such a height, that its summit is for ever enveloped 
in clouds ; and no man, even if he had twenty hands 
and as many feet, could ascend it. In the middle of 
this cliff, she says, is a cave facing the west, but so 
high, that a man in a ship passing under it could not 
shoot up to it with a bow. In this den dwells Scylla 
(Bitch), whose voice sounds like that of a young whelp : 
she had twelve feet and six long necks, with a terrific 
head, and three rows of close -set teeth on each. Ever- 
more she stretches out these necks aud catches the 
porpoises, sea-dogs, and other large animals of the sea, 



44 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

which swim by, and out of every ship that passes each 
mouth takes a man. 

" The opposite rock, the goddess informs him, is 
much lower, for a man could shoot oyer it. A wild fig- 
tree grows on it, stretching his branches down to the 
water : but beneath, s divine Charybdis ' three times each 
day absorbs and regorges the dark water. It is much 
more dangerous, she adds, to pass Charybdis than Scylla. 

"As Odysseus sailed by, Scylla took six of Ms 
crew; and when, after he had lost his ship and 
companions, he was carried by wind and wave, as he 
floated on a part of the wreck, between the monsters, 
the mast by which he supported himself was sucked in 
by Charybdis. He held by the fig-tree, till it was 
thrown out again, and resumed his voyage." — Mythology 
of Ancient Greece and Italy. Sec. edit., p. 271. 

It has been thought by some, that by the word 
Scylla is meant the bitch of the sea-dog, or seal — a 
creature often found on this coast. Be this as it may 
(and the seal having a more human look than the dog, 
might suggest a more frightful image, to say nothing of 
its being more appropriate to the water), who was 
Scylla ? and how came she to be this tremendous 
monster? From the jealousy of Circe. Scylla was 
originally a beautiful maiden, fond of the company of 
the sea-nymphs ; and Glaucus (Sea-green), a god of the 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 45 

sea, was in love with her. She did not like him ; and 
Glaucus applied to Circe for help, from her skill in 
magic. Circe fell in love with the lover, and being- 
enraged with the attractions that made him refuse her, 
poisoned the water in which Scylla bathed. The result 
was the conversion of the beauty's lower limbs into a 
set of barking dogs. The dogs became part of her; 
and when in her horror she thought to drive them back, 
she found herself " hauling " them along— one creature, 
says Ovid, hauling many : 

Quos fugit, attrahit una. — Metam. xiv. v. 63. 
This is very dreadful. Yet Homer's creature is more 
so. Scylla' s proceedings, in the Odyssey, exactly 
resemble the accounts which mariners have given of a 
huge sea-polypus — a cousin of the kraken, or sea- 
serpent — who thrusts its gigantic feelers over the deck 
of an unsuspecting ship, and carries off seamen. There 
is a picture of it in one of the editions of Buffon. But 
the dog-like barking, and the terrific head and teeth, to 
which the imagination gives something of a human 
aspect, leave the advantage of the horrible still on the 
side of the poet. 

An old English poet, Lodge, at a time when our 
earliest dramatists, who were university-men, had set 
the example of a love of classical fable, wrote a poem on 
Glaucus and Scylla, in which there are passages of the 



46 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

loveliest beauty; though it was spoilt, as a whole, with 

conceits. In describing the nymph's yellow hair, he 

makes use of a Sicilian image, very fit for our Blue Jar : — 

Her hair, not truss'd, but scatter'd on her brow, 
Surpassing Hybla's honey. 

We are to suppose it lying in sunny flakes. Lodge, 
though he was an Oxford man, or perhaps for that 
reason, has curiously mixed up Paganism and Chris- 
tianity in Glaucus's complaint of his mistress : but 
the second verse is fine, and the last truly lover-like 
and touching : — 

Alas, sweet nymphs, my godhead 's all in vain ; 
For why ? this breast includes immortal pain. 

Scylla hath eyes, but two sweet eyes hath Scylla ; 
Scylla hath hands, fair hands, but coy in touching : 
Scylla in wit surpasseth grave Sibylla : 

(This is the Sibyl of iEneas) 

Scylla hath words, but words well-stored with grutching ; 
Scylla, a saint in look, no saint in scorning, 
Look saint-like, Scylla, lest I die with mourning. 

The modulation and antithetical turn of these verses 
will remind the reader not only of Lodge's friends, 
Peele and Greene, who had both a fine ear for music, 
but of Shakspeare's first production, Venus and Adonis, 
in which he exhibited that fondness for classical fable 
which never forsook him. It is remarkable indeed, that 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 47 

the old English poets, and those true successors of 
theirs whom we have seen in our own time, have heen 
almost more Greek in this respect than the Greeks 
themselves. Spenser was half made up of it ; Milton 
could not help introducing it in Paradise Lost; and it 
was rescued from the degradation it underwent in the 
French school of poetry, with its cant about the 
" Paphian bower," and its identifications of Venus and 
Chloe, by the inspired Muse of Keats. The young 
English poet has told the present story in his Endymion, 
though not in his best manner, except where he speaks 
of Circe ; of the inflictions of whose sorcery he gives a 
scene of the finest and most appalling description : — 

A sight too fearful for the feel of fear.— 
In thicket hid— 

(It is Glaucus who is speaking, and whom the poet 
represents as having been beguiled into Circe's love) — 

In thicket hid I curs'd the haggard scene — ■ 
The banquet of my arms, my arbour queen, 
Seated upon an uptorn forest root, 
- And all around her shapes, wizard and brute, 
Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpenting. 

Fierce, wan, 
And tyrannizing was the lady's look, 
As over them a gnarled staff she shook. 

The look of a sorceress, full of bad passions, was never 

painted more strongly than in the meeting of those 



48 A JAB OF HONEY FEOM MOUNT HYBLA. 

epithets, " wan and tyrannizing; " and the word "lady" 

makes the fierceness more shocking. 

But Keats had not the heart to make the love-part 

of the story end unhappily, much less to endure the 

brutification of the lovely limbs of Scylla. He revived 

her to be put into a Lovers' Elysium. So, in telling 

the story of Alpheus and Arethusa, he will not let 

Arethusa reject Alpheus willingly. He makes her 

lament the necessity as one of the train of Diana ; 

and leaves us to conclude that the lovers became 

happy. It would hardly be necessary to tell any reader 

(only it is as pleasant to repeat these stories, as it is to 

hear beautiful old airs) that Alpheus was a river-god of 

Greece, who fell in love with the wood-nymph 

Arethuse ; and that the latter, praying for help to 

Diana, was converted into a stream, and pursued under 

land and sea by the other enamoured water, as far as 

the island of Sicily, where the streams became united. 

The strangeness of the adventure, and the beauty of the 

names, have made everybody in love with the story. 

All the world knows how "divine Alpheus," as Milton 

says — 

Stole under seas to meet his Arethuse ; 

or rather they all knew the fact ; but the lwiv, or 

manner of it, was a puzzle, till Keats related the 

adventure as it was witnessed by Endymion in a 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 49 

grotto under the sea. The lover of the Moon suddenly 

heard strange distant echoes, which seemed — 

The ghosts, the dying swells 
Of noises far away — hist ! — Hereupon 
He kept an anxious ear. The humming tone 
Came louder ; and behold ! there, as he lay, 
On either side out-gush'd, with misty spray, 
A copious spring ; and both together dash'd 
Swift, mad, fantastic round the rocks, and lash'd 
Among the conchs and shells of the lofty grot, 
Leaving a trickling dew. 

(These are the two living streams, one in pursuit of the 

other.) 

At last they shot 
Down from the ceiling's height, pouring a noise 
As of some breathless racers, whose hopes poise 
Upon the last few steps, and with spent force 
Along the ground they took a winding course. 
Endymion follow'd, for it seem'd that one 
Ever pursued, the other strove to shun. 

After a while, he hears a whispering dialogue, in 

which the female voice shows plainly enough, that the 

speaker would stay if she might ; but suddenly the 

severe face of Diana is before her, and in an instant 

Fell 
Those two sad streams adown a fearful dell ; 

and Endymion puts up a prayer for their escape. 

When the writer of the present book was in Italy, 
he saw on a mantelpiece a card inscribed, Le Marquis 
de Retuse, This was the Frenchified denomination of 

4 



50 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

a Sicilian nobleman, who, strangely combining Greek 
and Gothic in his title, was no less a personage than 
the Marquis of Arethusa ! He was proprietor of the 
spot where the fountain exists under its old name, 
though, according to travellers, deplorably altered ; for 
it has become, says one of them, the public "wash- 
tub ! " It is the Syracusan laundry. Divers, he 
informs us, are the jokes cracked on the " nymphs " 
that now attend it. Some critics are of opinion, that 
such were the " only nymphs " that ever existed ; and 
they are very merry over the fallen condition of the once 
exquisite Arethusa. Poor devils ! taking pains to 
vulgarize their perceptions, and diminish the amount 
of grace and joy. As if Arethusa, like themselves, were 
at the mercy of a homely association ; or all that had 
been written about her was no better than their own 
account with the laundress ! They natter themselves. 
They leave her just where she was — everywhere, and 
immortal. It may not be very pleasant to look for a 
poetic fountain, and find a laundry ; but the imagination 
is a poor one indeed, which is to be overwhelmed by it. 
The nymphs of minds like these could never have been 
very different from laundresses, if the truth were known ; 
or, at the utmost, of little higher stock than such as 
laundresses and milliners are the making of. 

There are two things, we confess, about the Sirens, 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 51 

that perplex us. In the first place, we never found 
anything particularly attractive in the songs attributed 
to them, not even by Homer ; and secondly, we are too 
much in the secret of their deformity. We know that 
they were ghastly monsters, bird-harpies with women's 
heads, and surrounded with human bones ; and the 
consequence is, we can never find them in the least 
degree enticing. It is to no purpose that they combine 
stringed with wind instruments, and a voice crowning- 
all. One of them may call herself Fair-Goddess 
(Leucothea), and another Fine-voice (Ligeia), and the 
third Maiden-face (Parthenope). We know all about 
them, and are not to be taken in. It would require a 
dream as horrible as Coleridge's Pains of Sleep, to bring 
our antipathy into any communication with them — to 

make us walk in our sleep towards their quarter : — 

Desire with loathing strangely mix'd, 

On wild and hateful objects fix'd ; 

Fantastic passions, maddening brawl, 

And shame and terror over all. 
When the modern poets turned the Sirens into 
mermaids, they vastly improved the breed. A woman, 
we grant, who is half a fish, is not a desideratum ; but 
she is better than a great human-faced bird hopping 
about; and besides, the conformation of the creatures 
being thus altered, we are not so sure they will do us 
harm, especially as the poets treat them with com- 



52 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

parative respect, sometimes even with tenderness. The 

names above mentioned acquire a double elegance in the 

adjurations of the Spirit in Covins : — 

By Thetis' tinsel- slipper'd feet, 
And the songs of Sirens sweet, 
By dead Parthenope's dear tomb, 
And fair Ligeia's golden comb, 
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks, 
Sleeking her soft alluring locks. 

These alluring locks come home to us. We have seen 

such at our elbows, and can hear the comb passing 

through them. 

Spenser increased the number of the Sirens to five, 

and expressly designated them as mermaids : — 

And now they nigh approached to the stead 
Whereas those mermaids dwelt. It was a still 
And calmy bay, on th' one side sheltered 
With the broad shadow of an hoary hill; 
On th' other side an high rock towered still, 
That 'twixt them both a pleasant port they made, 
And did like an half theatre fulfil. 
There those five sisters had continual trade, 
And used to bathe themselves in that deceiptful shade. 
— Fairy Queen, book ii. canto 12. 

This line is so soft and gently drawn out, and the 
place so sweet and natural, that when Sirens like 
these begin to sing, we really feel in danger. We do 
not wonder that the poet's hero desired his boatman to 

Row easily, 
And let him hear some part of their rare melody. 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 



53 




E have kept the most beau- 
tiful of the Sicilian mythic 
stories to conclude with : for 
such, doubtless, is the Rape of 
Proserpine. It is full of the 
most striking contrasts of gran- 
deur and beauty. Both heaven 
and hell are in it — the freshest 
vernal airs, with the depths of Tartarus ; and the hearts 
of a mother and daughter beat through all. It is a 
tale at once of the wildest preternaturalism and the 
most familiar domestic tenderness. The daughter of 
Ceres is gathering flowers, with other damsels of her 
own age, in the Yale of Enna, intent upon nothing 
but seeing who shall get the finest. Suddenly, in 



54 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

the midst of the violets and jonquils, there is an 
earthquake : a noise is heard like the coming of a 
thousand chariots ; the earth bursts open ; and a rapid, 
majestic figure appears, like a swarthy Jupiter, who, 
sweeping by Proserpine, whirls her away with him into 
his car, and prepares to rush clown through another 
opening. Of all her attendants, the nymph Cyane alone 
has the courage to bid him stop, and ask him why he 
dares take away the daughter of Ceres. He makes no 
answer, but, knitting his brows like thunderbolts, smites 
the fountain over which she presided with his iron 
mace, and dashes down through it with his prey. It is 
the King of Hell himself, tired of celibacy, and resolved 
to have the fairest creature on earth for his wife. 

The cries of Proserpine become fainter as the earth 
closes over them ; but they have been heard by Ceres 
herself, who comes, with all the speed of a divine 
being, to see what is the matter. She can discern 
nothing ; the tranquillity of the scene is restored ; 
Cyane has melted away in tears. The goddess seeks 
everywhere in vain. She travels by day and by night, 
lit by two flaming pines from Mount iEtna. At length 
she learns who has got her child ; and, by the interven- 
tion of Jupiter, Proserpine is allowed to come to earth 
and see her. The mother and daughter are half 
drowned in tears, half absorbed in delight, and Jupiter 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 55 

would prevent their separation, but is not able ; for 
Proserpine has eaten of a fatal fruit, compulsory of her 
continuance with Pluto ; and all that can be done, is to 
stipulate for her being half a year with her mother, on 
condition of her being a good wife during the other half. 
Ceres makes a virtue of the necessity, seeing that her 
daughter is married to the brother of Jove ; and 
Proserpine is content to divide the throne of Tartarus, 
and walk in gardens of her own, splendid, though 
subterraneous. 

The ancient poets made these gardens consist of 
all the flowers which she had been accustomed to gather 
in Sicily ; but modern imagination, which (with leave be 
it said) is still finer than theirs, and sees beauty beyond 
its ordinary manifestation in the fitness of things, and 
in the balance of good and evil, has told us, through 
the inspired medium of Spenser, that the garden was 
such a garden as might have been expected from " the 
grandeur of the glooms " in those lower regions : — 

There mournful cypress grew in greatest store, 
And trees of bitter gall, and ebon sad, 
Deep- sleeping poppy, and black hellebore, 
Cold coloquintida, and tetra mad, 
Mortal samnitis, and cicuta bad, 
With which the unjust Athenians made to die 
Wise Socrates, who thereof quaffing glad 
Pour'd out his life and last philosophy 
To the fair Critias, his dearest belamy. 



56 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

The Garden of Proserpina this hight ; 

And in the midst thereof a silver seat, 

With a thick arbour goodly overflight, 

In which she often used from open heat 

Herself to shroud, and pleasures to entreat ; 

Next thereunto did grow a goodly tree, 

With branches broad dispread, and body great, 

Clothed with leaves, that none the fruit might see, 

And loaden all with fruit as thick as it might be. 

Their fruit were golden apples, glistering bright. 

Fairy Queen, book ii. canto 7. 

Here we see, that Proserpine enjoyed herself in the 
lower regions, though among flowers of a different kind 
from those to which she had been accustomed. She 
became used to the place, and found pleasures even in 
Tartarus. And reasonably. First, because she needed 
them ; and in the second place, because she knew there 
was good as well as evil there, and that the evil itself 
contained good. The hemlock was "bad," inasmuch as 
it killed Socrates, but it was good, also, for many a 
medicinal cup. "Deep-sleeping poppy" was a very 
kindly fellow, if properly treated ; and all the flowers, 
after their kind, were full of beauty. Flowers cannot 
help being beautiful. Then there was the Silver Seat 
and the Golden Tree; and it is manifest, that the 
summer sun used to come there through some unknown 
ravine, to say nothing of Wordsworth's 

Calm pleasures and majestic pains. 



SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY. 



57 



We do not, to be sure, see what good Tantalus's 
eternal thirst could have been to him, or the everlasting 
wheel to Ixion ; but, probably, on coming up to those 
gentlemen, we should have found they were visions, put 
there to make us " snatch a fearful joy " at thinking we 
were not among them in propria persona. 

And so we take leave of the beautiful ancient fables 
of Sicily, having found honey for our Jar even in the 
fields of Pluto. 




58 



A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 



CHAPTER III. 

GLANCES AT- ANCIENT SICILIAN HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. 

VICISSITUDES OF SICILIAN GOVERNMENT. GLANCES AT PHALARIS, 

STESICHORUS, EMPEDOCLES, HIERO I., SIMONIDES, EPICHARMUS, 
DIONYSIUS I., DAMON AND PYTHIAS, DAMOCLES, DIONYSIUS II., 
DION, PLATO, AGATHOCLES, HANNIBAL, HIERO II., THEOCRITUS, 
ARCHIMEDES, MARCELLUS, VERRES ; AND PARTICULARS RELAT- 
ING TO GELLIAS. 



ICILY being 
one of those 
small, beauti- 
ful, and abun- 
dant countries 
which excite 
the cupidity of 
larger ones, has 
had as many 
foreign masters 
as the poor 
Princess of Ba- 
bylon in Boc- 




GLANCES AT ANCIENT SICILIAN HISTORY, ETC. 59 

caccio, who, on her way to be married to the King of 
Colchos, fell iuto the hands of nine husbands. First, 
in all probability, came subjugators from the Italian 
continent; then Phoenicians, or commercial invaders; 
then, undoubtedly, Greeks ; then Carthaginians ; then 
Eomans, Goths, Saracens, Normans, Germans, French- 
men, Spaniards, Gallo- Spaniards, Frenchmen again, 
Gallo- Spaniards again ; and in the possession of these 
last it remains. Under the Greeks, its cities grew into 
powerful independent states. Syracuse was once twenty- 
two miles in circumference. The most prominent names 
in the ancient history of Sicily are touched upon in the 
following list. 

Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigentum, who roasted people 
in a brazen bull, in which he was ultimately made to 
roar himself. That is to say, if the bull be true. For 
the reign of this prince was at so remote a period, and 
the excitement of exaggeration is so tempting, that the 
sight of the bull in after times proves no more than 
was proved by the brazen wolf of Romulus and 
Remus. The age of Phalaris was that of the Prophet 
Daniel. 

Stesichorus, a majestic lyrical poet, in one of whose 
fragments is to be found the beautiful fiction of the 
Golden Boat of the Sun. The Sun-God sails in it, 
invisibly, round the Northern Sea in the night-time, 



60 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

so as to be ready to re-appear in the East in the 
morning. 

Empedocles, the Pythagorean philosopher. He is 
accused of leaping into JEtna, in the hope of being 
supernaturally missed, and so taken for a god — a pro- 
ject betrayed by the ejection of one of his brazen 
sandals. But a philosopher may perish by a volcano, 
as Pliny did, without giving envy a right to make him a 
laughing-stock. 

Hiero the First, of Syracuse ; a bad prince, but a 
possessor of good horses and charioteers ; for whose 
victories in the Olympic games his name has become 
celebrated by means of Pindar. Hiero is the great 
name in the Kacing Calendar of antiquity. 

Simonides, the elegiac poet. He was a native of 
Ceos, but lived much, and died in Sicily, where he was 
a great favourite. His repeated delays and final answer 
to Hiero, when desired to give a definition of the Deity, 
have been deservedly celebrated, and are a lesson to 
presumption for all time. He first requested a day 
to consider ; then two more days ; then doubled and 
redoubled the number ; till the king, demanding the 
reason of this conduct, was told by the poet that " the 
longer he considered the question, the more impossible 
he found it to answer." 

Epicharmus, the supposed founder of comedy. He 



GLANCES AT ANCIENT SICILIAN HISTOBY, ETC. 61 

was a great philosopher as well as poet, and furnished 
no little matter to Plato. He died at ninety, some say 
at ninety-seven, a longevity attributable to the modera- 
tion of his way of life, and the serenity of his temper. 
He says in one of his fragments : — 

A darling and a grace is Peace of Mind ; 
She lives next door to Temperance. 

Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse (the Elder). He 
wrote bad verses ; slept in a bed with a trench round it 
and a drawbridge ; and, for fear of a barber, burnt 
away his beard with hot walnut-shells. What a razor ! 
Dionysius had abilities enough to become the more 
hateful for his capricious and detestable qualities. Pro- 
bably he had a spice of madness in him, which power 
exasperated. Ariosto has turned him to fine account in 
his personification of Suspicion. 

Damon and Pythias, the famous friends. One of 
them became surety to Dionysius for the other's appear- 
ance at the scaffold, and was not disappointed. Diony- 
sius begged to be admitted a third in the partnership ! — 
the most ridiculous thing, perhaps, that even the tyrant 
ever did. 

Damocles, the courtly gentleman, who pronounced 
Dionysius the happiest man on earth. He was treated 
by his master to a " proof of the pudding " which 
tyrants eat. He sat crowned at the head of a luxurious 



62 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

banquet, in the midst of odours, music, and homage ; 
and saw, suspended by a hair over his head, a naked 
sword. This, it must be confessed, was a happy thought 
of the royal poet — a practical epigram of the very finest 
point. 

Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse (the Younger), who, 
on his ejection from the throne, is said to have become 
a schoolmaster at Corinth; "in order," says Cicero, 
" that he might still be a scourger somehow." 

Dion, his relation, and Timoleon of Corinth, the 
great but unhappy fratricide; both of whom advanced 
the liberties of Syracuse. 

Plato ; who visited both the Dionysiuses, to induce 
them to become philosophers ! He might as well have 
asked tigers in a sheepfold to prefer a dish of green 



Agathocles the Potter, tyrant of the whole island ; 
who piqued himself on outdoing the cruelties of Phalaris. 
His objection to the brazen bull was, that you could not 
see the face of the person tortured ; so he invented a 
hollow iron man with an open visor, in order that he 
might contemplate the face of the occupant, while 
heating over a slow fire. But let us hope the story is 
not true ; for, though things as horrible have taken place 
in the world, the wicked themselves have been calum- 
niated. 



GLANCES AT ANCIENT SICILIAN HISTORY, ETC. 63 

Hannibal, during the Punic wars. You see him, at 
this period of time, looming in the distance over every 
other object, and standing in Sicily like a great visiting 
giant. He is accounted, we believe, on military authority, 
the greatest captain that ever lived. So different is 
success in art from prosperity in fortune. 

Hiero the Second, of Syracuse. A prudent and 
popular ally of the Komans. He showed no great favour 
to Theocritus. He built a huge toy-ship, in which were 
gardens, a wrestling-ground, rooms full of pictures and 
statues, floors with subjects from Homer painted in 
mosaic, and eight fortified towers ! "We should like to 
know what Tom Bowling would have said to it. "When 
it was completed, it was found that there was no har- 
bour in Sicily fit to receive it ; so the king sent it as a 
present to Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt. 

Theocritus, the great pastoral and miscellaneous 
poet, for pastoral was not his only, or his highest excel- 
lence. Circumstances appear to have made a present of 
him also, as well as the ship, to King Ptolemy; for 
Hiero neglected, and Philadelphus patronized him. 

Archimedes, kinsman of Hiero. His wonderful 
mechanical inventions are among the daily instruments 
of utility all over the world. The Romans were obliged 
to suspend their operations against Syracuse, solely by 
the terror he occasioned them with his cranes that lifted 



64 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

their ships, and his glasses that burnt them. When 
the city was taken, orders were given to spare the great 
man, and bring him before the Eoman general, that he 
might be duly honoured ; but a stupid soldier unwit- 
tingly despatched him, provoked at having been re- 
quested to wait while the philosopher finished a problem. 
The problem part of the story is not very likely. Sir 
Isaac Newton carried abstraction far enough, when he 
forgot that he had eaten his dinner, or when he used a 
lady's finger for a tobacco-stopper ; but an engineer for- 
getting his own city while it was being taken by storm 
and howling about his ears, seems a little too hard a 
sample of it. 

Marcellus, the Eoman general on this occasion. His 
eyes are said to have filled with tears at the thought of 
all that was going to happen to the conquered city. He 
was the first successful opposer of Hannibal. When 
reproached for carrying off paintings and other works of 
art from Sicily, he said he did it to refine the minds of 
his countrymen. His tears render every anecdote of 
him precious to posterity. 

Verres, one of the governors of Sicily while it was 
a Koman province ; — infamous for the tyranny and 
effrontery of his extortions, even if but half of what 
Cicero said of him was true : for we must confess that 
we seldom believe more of what is told us by that illus- 



GLANCES AT ANCIENT SICILIAN HISTORY, ETC. C5 

trious talker ; especially as lie warns us against himself, 
by contradicting in one passage what he says in another. 
Vide his recommendations of people in his letters, and 
his discommendations of them in other letters, privately 
sent at the same time. Also, his vituperations and 
panegyrics of the same individuals concerned in the 
civil wars, just as it suited him to condemn or to court 
them ; to say nothing of his divorces and weddings for 
interest's sake. We have said the more of him in this 
place because he too, at one time, held the office of 
governor in Sicily, where he discovered the tomb of 
Archimedes — a memorial, alas ! forgotten by the philo- 
sopher's countrymen in less than a century and a half 
after his death ! They wanted to " stand out " Cicero, 
that there was no such thing. However, they had not 
forgotten Theocritus. The greatest mechanical movers 
of the earth affect the imagination less than they ought 
to do, and the heart not at all. The lever and the 
screw, as the steam-engine will, beCbme homely com- 
mon-places ; whereas love and song, and the beauties 
of Nature, are sought with transport, like holidays after 
business. 

The names thus enumerated (for little or no interest 
attends the Goth and Vandal portion of the history of 
this island), may be said to point to all the characters 
of any importance in Sicilian antiquity, one only ex- 

5 



66 A JAH OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

cepted. This individual we have kept to the last, 
though he was little more than a private person, and 
is not at all famous. But we have a special regard for 
him ; far more indeed, than for most of those that have 
been mentioned ; and we think that such of our readers 
as are not already acquainted with him, will have one 
too ; for he was of that tip -top class of human beings 
called Good Fellows, and a very prince of the race. 
What renders him a still better fellow than he might 
otherwise have been, and doubles his heroical qualities 
in discerning eyes, is, that he was but an insignificant 
little body to look at, and not very well shaped ; — a 
mannikin, in short, that Sir Godfrey Kneller's nephew, 
the slave-trader, who rated the painter and his friend 
Pope at less than "ten guineas'" worth "the pair," 
would probably not have valued at more than two 
pounds five. 

The name of this great unknown was Gellias, and 
you must search into by-corners ? even of Sicilian 
history, to find anything about him; but he was just 
the man for our Jar ; — sweet as the honey that Samson 
found in the jaws of the lion. 

Gellias was the richest man in the rich city of 
Agrigentum. The Agrigentines, according to a saying 
of their countryman Empedocles, were famous for 
" building as if they were to live for ever, and feasting 



GLANCES AT ANCIENT SICILIAN HISTOBY, ETC. 67 

as if they were to die next day." But they were as 
good-natured and hospitable as they were festive ; and 
Gellias, in accordance with the superiority of his circum- 
stances, was the most good-natured and hospitable of 
them all. His magnificence resembled that of a Barme- 
cide. Slaves were stationed at the gates of his noble 
mansion to invite strangers to enter. His cellar had 
three hundred reservoirs cut in the solid rock, each con- 
taining seven hundred gallons of wine at their service. 
One day five hundred horsemen halted at his door, who 
had been overtaken by a storm. He lodged and enter- 
tained them all ; and, by way of dry clothes, made each 
man a present of a new tunic and robe. 

His wit appears to have been as ready as it was 
pungent. He was sent ambassador on some occasion 
to the people of Centauripa, a place at the foot of 
Mount iEtna. "When he rose in the assembly to 
address them, his poor little figure made so ridiculous 
a contrast with his mission, that they burst into fits 
of laughter. Gellias waited his time, and then re- 
quested them not to be astonished ; — " for," said he, " it 
is the custom with Agrigentum to suit the ambassador 
to his locality ; to send noble-looking persons to great 
cities, and insignificant ones to the insignificant." 

The combined magnanimity and address of this 
sarcasm are not to be surpassed. Ambassadors are 



68 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

privileged people ; but they have not always been spared 
by irritated multitudes ; yet our hero did not hesitate to 
turn the ridicule of the Centauripans on themselves. 
He "showed up" the smallness of their pretensions, 
both as a community and as observers. He did not 
blink the fact of his own bodily insignificance — too sore 
a point with little people in general, notwithstanding 
the fact that many of the greatest spirits of the world 
have resided in frames as petty. He made it the very 
ground for exposing the still smaller pretensions of the 
souls and understandings of his deriders. Or, supposing 
that he said it with a good-humoured smile, — with an 
air of rebuke to their better sense, — still the address 
was as great, and the magnanimity as candid. He not 
only took the " bull by the horns," but turned it with 
his mighty little hands into a weapon of triumph. Such 
a man, insignificant as his general exterior may have 
been, must, after all, have had something fine in some 
part of it — something great in some part of its expres- 
sion ; probably fine eyes, and a smile full of benignity. 

Gellias proved that his soul was of the noblest order, 
not only by a princely life, but by the heroical nature of 
his death. Agrigentum lay on the coast opposite Car- 
thage. It had been a flourishing place, partly by reason 
of its commerce with that city ; but was at last insulted 
by it and subdued. Most of the inhabitants fled. 



GLANCES AT ANCIENT SICILIAN HlSTORt, ETC. 63 

Among those who remained was Gellias. He fancied 
that his great wealth, and his renown for hospitality, 
would procure him decent treatment. Finding, how- 
ever, that the least to be expected of the enemy was 
captivity, he set fire to a temple into which he had 
conveyed his wealth, and perished with it in the flames ; 
thus, says Stolberg, at once preventing " the profana- 
tion of the place, the enriching of the foe, and the 
disgrace of slavery." 

There ought to be a book devoted to the history of 
those whose reputations have not received their due. It 
would make a curious volume. It would be old in the 
materials, novel in the interest, and of equal delight 
and use. It is a startling reflection, that while men, 
such as this Gellias, must be dug up from the by-ways 
of history, its high-road is three-parts full of people who 
would never have been heard of, but for accidents of 
time and place. Take, for instance, the majority of the 
Koman emperors, of those of Germany, of the turbulent 
old French noblesse, and indeed of three-fourths, per- 
haps nine-tenths of historical names all over the world. 
The reflection, nevertheless, suggests one of a more 
consolatory kind, namely, that genius and great quali- 
ties are not the only things to be considered in this 
world; — that common-place also has its right to be 
heard ; common affections and common wants ; — ay, 



'0 



A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 



the more in the latter case, because they are common. 
The worst of it is, that common-place in power, is not 
fond of allowing this right to its brother common-place 
out of it. The progress of knowledge, however, tends 
to a greater impartiality ; and the consideration of this 
fact must be the honey, meantime, to many a bitter 
thought. 



m 




( 71 ) 



CHAPTER IV. 

THEOCBITUS. 

PASTORAL POETEY. SPECIMENS OF THE STRENGTH AND COMIC 

HUMOUR OF THEOCRITUS THE PRIZE-FIGHT BETWEEN POL- 
LUX AND AMYCUS THE SYRACUSAN GOSSIPS. 

ASTOKAL 

poetry is 
supposed 
to have 
originated 
in Sicily, 
at one and 
the same 
At all 



time with comedy 
events, it was perfected there. 
Comedy is understood to 
have been suggested by the 
licence with which it was the 
custom for peasants to rail 
at passengers, and at one 
another, during the jollity 
of the vintage ; and pastoral 
poetry was at first nothing 




72 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

but the more rustical part of comedy. Its great master, 
Theocritus, arose during a period of refinement; and 
being a man of a universal genius, with a particular 
regard for the country, perfected this homelier kind 
of pastoral, and at the same time anticipated all the 
others. His single scenes are the germ of the pastoral 
drama. He is as clownish as Gay, as domestic as 
Allan Ramsay, as elegant as Virgil and Tasso, and 
(with the allowance for the difference between ancient 
and modern imagination) as poetical as Fletcher ; and 
in passion he beats them all. In no other pastoral 
poetry is there anything to equal his Polyphemus. 

The world has long been sensible of this superiority. 
But, in one respect, even the world has not yet done 
justice to Theocritus. The world, indeed, takes a long 
time, or must have a twofold blow given it as manifest 
and sustained as Shakspeare's, to entertain two ideas at 
once respecting anybody. It has been said of wit, that 
it indisposes people to admit a serious claim on the 
part of its possessor ; and pastoral poetry subjects a 
man to the like injustice, by reason of its humble modes 
of life, and its gentle scenery. People suppose that he 
can handle nothing stronger than a crook. They should 
read Theocritus's account of Hercules slaying the lion, 
or of the " stand-up fight," the regular and tremendous 
"set-to," between Pollux and Amycus. The best 



THEOCRITUS. 73 

Moulsey-Hurst business was a feather to it. Theocritus 
was a son of iEtna — all peace and luxuriance in ordi- 
nary, all fire and wasting fury when he chose it. He 
was a genius equally potent and universal ; and it is a 
thousand pities that unknown circumstances in his life 
hindered him from completing the gigantic fragments, 
which seem to have been portions of some intended 
great work on the deeds of Hercules, perhaps on the 
Argonautic Expedition. He has given us Hercules and 
the Serpents, Hercules and Hylas, Hercules and the 
Lion, and the pugilistical contest of the demigod's 
kinsman with a barbarian ; and the epithalamium of 
their relation Helen may have been designed as a 
portion of the same multifarious poem — an anticipation 
of the romance of modern times, and of the glory of 
Ariosto. What a loss ! * 



* There have heen writers who concluded that Theocritus did not 
write some of these poems, because the style of them differed from that 
of his pastorals. " As though" (says Mr. Chapman, his best translator) 
" the same poet could not possibly excel in different styles." But this is 
the way the opinions we have alluded to come up. A writer's powers 
are turned against himself, and his very property is to be denied him, 
because critics of this kind have brains for nothing but one species of 
handicraft. It is lucky for the human being in the abstract, that he is 
gifted with tears and smiles ; otherwise one or the other of those natural 
possessions would assuredly have been called in question. In fact, the 
marvel is, not that genius should deal in both, but that it should ever 
show itself incapable of either. Exclusive gravity and exclusive levity 
are alike a solecism, as far as regards the common source of emotion, 
which is sensitiveness to' impressions. 



74 A JAE OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

In the poem on the Prize-fight (for such is really 
the subject, the prize being the vanquished man), 
Pollux, the demigod, one of the sons of Leda by Jupiter, 
goes to shore from the ship Argo, with his brother 
Castor, to get some water. They arrive at a beautiful 
fountain in a wood, by the side of which is sitting a 
huge overbearing-looking fellow (avrip vTrtpoirXog, man 
presuming on his strength), who returns their salu- 
tation with insolence. The following, without any 
great violence to the letter of the ancient dialogue, may 
be taken as a sample of its spirit. The ruffian is 
addressed by Pollux: — 

THE PRIZE-FIGHT BETWEEN POLLUX AND AMYOUS. 

K)llux. Good day, friend. What sort of people, pray, 
live hereabouts ? 

Euffian. I see no good day when I see strangers. 

P. Don't be disturbed. We are honest people who ask 
the question, and come of an honest stock. 

R. I'm not disturbed at all, and don't require to learn it 
from such as you. 

P. You're an ill-mannered, insolent clown. 

R. I'm such as you see me. I never came meddlirg with 
you in your country. 

P. (good-humouredhj.) Come and meddle, and we'll help 
you to a little hospitality to take home with you. 

R. Keep it to yourselves : I neither give nor take. 

P. (smiling.) Well, my good friend, may we have a taste 
of your spring ? 



THEOCRITUS. 75 

R. Ask your throats when they're dry. 

P. Come, what's your demand for it ? What are we to 
pay? 

E. Hands up, and man against man. 

P. What, a fight ; or is it to be a kicking-match ? 

R. A fight ; and I would advise you to look about you. 

P. I do, and can't even see my antagonist. 

R. Here he sits. You'll find me no woman, I can tell you. 

P. Good ; and what are we to fight for ? What's the 
prize ? 

R. Submission. If you win, I'm to be at your service ; 
and if I win, you're to be at mine. 

P. Why, those are the terms of cocks upon dunghills. 

R. Cocks or lions, those are my terms, and you'll have the 
water on no other. 

With these words, Amycus (for it was lie— a son of 
Neptune — and the greatest pugilist but one, then known 
in the world) blew a blast on a shell, and a multitude of 
long-haired Bebrycians (his countrymen) came pouring 
in about the plane-tree, under which lie had been 
sitting. Castor went and called his brother shipmates 
out of the Argo, and the combatants, putting on their 
gauntlets, faced one another, and set to. 

ROUND THE FIRST. 

The contest began by trying to see which of the two 
should get the sun in his rear. Pollux obtained this 
advantage over the big man by dint of his wit (for 
though a demigod himself, he was less in bulk). The 



76 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

giant, finding the sun full on his face, pushed forward 
in a rage ; and striking out further than he intended, 
laid himself open to a blow on the chin. This enraged 
him the more ; and pushing still forward, he hung in a 
manner over his enemy, thinking with his huge body to 
bear him down. His people encouraged the project 
with a great shout ; and the Argonauts, not to be 
behind hand, gave their champion another ; for, in 
truth, they were not without apprehensions as to the 
result, seeing how enormous the body was. But the 
son of Jove slipped hither and thither, lacerating him 
all the while with double quick blows, and thus re- 
pulsing the endeavour. Aniycus was compelled fairly 
to hold himself up as well as he could, for he was 
drunk with blows, and so he stood, vomiting blood. 
The noise of voices arose on all sides from the specta- 
tors, for his face was a mass of ulcers ; and it was so 
swollen that you could hardly see his eyes. The son of 
Jove kept him still in a state of confusion, forcing him 
to waste his strength and spirits by striking out hither 
and thither to no purpose. At last, on seeing him 
about to lose his senses, he planted a final blow on the 
top of his nose, betwixt the eyebrows, and the giant fell 
at his length on the grass, with his face upwards. 



THEOCEITUS. 77 

EOUND THE SECOND. 

Amyous rose on recovering his senses, and the fight 
was renewed with double fury. The dull-witted giant 
thought to knock the life out of his antagonist speedily, 
by striking heavily at his chest ; but, by this proceeding, 
he again laid his face open, and the invincible Pollux 
disfigured and made it a heap of filth with unseemly 
blows. The flesh, which had before been so puffed up, 
now seemed to subside and melt away ; the whole huge 
creature seemed to become little, while the less one 
assumed a greater aspect, and looked fresher for his 
toil. 

" Say, Muse, for thou knowest," how it was that the 
son of Jove finally overcame "the gluttonous" * giant. 

" Thinking to do something great, the big Bebry- 
cian," leaning out of the right line, caught in his 
left hand the left hand of his adversary, and bringing 
forth from his side his own huge right one, aimed a 
blow, which, had it struck where it intended, would 
have done mischief; but the son of Jove stooped from 

* 'AdrjQayov — Literally, insatiably eating, voracious ; one who has 
never had enough. Observe how the same instinctive phraseology is 
used by strong sensations all over the world. The " Fancy " pugilistic, 
and fancy poetical, like differently bred relations, thus find themselves, 
to their astonishment, of the same family ; so the like metaphors of 
" flashing one's ivories " (for suddenly showing the teeth), " tapping the 
claret," and other jovial escapes from vulgarity into elegance. 



78 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

under it, and emerging, gave his enemy such a blow 
on the left temple as made it spout with blood. He 
assisted the blow, directly, with another on the mouth, 
given by the hand which the giant had let drop ; and 
crashing his teeth with the weight of it, followed it with 
a general clatter on the face, which mashed it a second 
time, and rendered resistance hopeless. Heavily fell 
Amycus to the ground, having no more heart, and 
raising his hands as he fell, in sign of throwing up 
the contest. 

But nothing unbefitting thy worthiness, didst thou inflict, 
pugilist Polydeuctes, on the conquered. Only he made him 
take a great oath — calling on his father Neptune out of the 
sea to witness it — that never more would he do anything 
grievous to those who sought his hospitality. 

It appears to us, reader, and we think it will appear 
to thee, that even this pro sift cation of a fine bit of 
poetry will afford no disgraceful evidence of the strength 
and muscle of the gentle shepherd Theocritus. The 
manner of the concluding passage is quite in the taste 
of the chivalrous poets of Italy; and forces us to 
repeat our regret, that the Sicilian left no larger 
work, to be put at the head of their romances. The 
Odyssey, indeed, is their leader in some respects ; but 
to the grandeur, the wild fictions, and the domestic 
tenderness of the Odyssey, Theocritus would have 



THEOCRITUS. 79 

added the gaiety and good-natured satire of Pulci and 
Ariosto. 

Here follows a specimen (such as it is, and as far as 
we can pretend to represent the original) of the comic 
and domestic painting of Theocritus. It is a poem on 
the Rites of Adonis ; or rather, on a couple of gossips, 
making holiday to enjoy the festival that formed a part 
of the rites. Adonis, the favourite of Venus, slain by 
the boar, and permitted by Jupiter to return to life 
every half-year and enjoy her company, 'was annually 
commemorated by the heathen world for the space of 
two days, the first of which was passed in mourning for 
his death, and the second, in feasting and merriment 
for his coming to life. Arsinoe, the consort of the 
poet's patron, Ptolemy Philadelphus, celebrated these 
rites in the Egyptian capital, Alexandria ; and Theo- 
critus, in order to praise his royal friends, and at the 
same time give a picture of his countrywomen, intro- 
duces two women who were born in Syracuse and 
settled in Alexandria, making holiday on the occasion, 
and going to see the show. The show was that of the 
second day, and principally consisted of an image of 
Adorns laid in a bower of leaves and tapestry, and 
served with all the luxuries of the season, particularly 
flowers in pots. He was attended by flying Cupids, and 
eulogized by singers in hymns, much in the manner of 



80 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

saints and angels in a modern Catholic festival ; and on 
the following morning, the image, with its flowers, was 
taken in procession to the sea- side, and committed to 
the waters on its way to the other world. The whole 
proceeding is intimated in the poem, by means of verses 
put into the mouth of the public singer, the Grisi or 
Malibran of the day ; but the chief portion of it is 
assigned to the humours of the two gossips, who are 
precisely such as would be drawn at this moment on a 
similar occasion in any crowded city. This truth to 
nature, which is the constant charm of Theocritus 
(making it, as he does, artistical also with wit and 
poetry), the reader will recognize at once in the talk 
about the husband, the endeavours to mystify the little 
boy, the chatter and bustle in the crowd, and the gaping 
expressions of delight and amazement at the spectacle. 
The opening of the poem lets us into a household 
scene, described with all the nicety and archness of 
Chaucer. 



THEOCRITUS. 81 



THE SYEACUSAN GOSSIPS; 

OR, THE FEAST OF ADONIS. 

GORGO, 



The Gossips. 
Praxinoe, J 

Eunoe, servant of Praxinoe. 

Phrygia, her housemaid. 

Little Boy, her Son. Old Woman. Two Men. 

Scene — Alexandria in Egypt. 

Gorgo. [at her friend's door.) Praxinoe within ? 

Eunoe. Why, Gorgo, dear, 

How late you are ! Yes, she's within. 

Prax. (appearing.) What, no ! 

And so you're come at last ! A seat here, Eunoe ; 
And set a cushion. 

Eunoe. There is one. 

Prax. Sit down. 

Gorgo. Oh, what a thing's a spirit ! Do you know, 
I've scarcely got alive to you, Praxinoe ? 
There's such a crowd — such heaps of carriages, 
And horses, and fine soldiers, all full dress'd ; 
And then you live such an immense way off! 

Prax. Why, 'twas his shabby doing. He would take 
This hole that he calls house, at the world's end. 
'Twas all to spite me, and to part us two. 

Gorgo. (speaking lower.) Don't talk so of your husband, 
there's a dear, 
Before the little one. See how he looks at you. 

Prax. (to the little bog.) There, don't look grave, child ; 
cheer up, Zopy, sweet ; 

6 



82 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HTELA. 

It isn't your papa we're talking of. 

Goego. (aside.) He thinks it is, though. 
Peax. Oh no — nice papa ! 

(To Goego.) Well, this strange body once (let us say once, 
And then he won't know who we're telling of), 
Going to buy some washes and saltpetre, 
Comes bringing salt ! the great big simpleton ! 

Goego. And there's my precious ninny, Dioclede : 
He gave for five old ragged fleeces, yesterday, 
Ten drachmas ! — for mere dirt ! trash upon trash ! 
But come ; put on your things ; button away, 
Or we shall miss the show. It's the king's own ; 
And I am told the queen has made of it 
A wonderful fine thing. 

Peax. Ay, luck has luck. 

Well, tell us all about it ; for we hear 
Nothing in this vile place. 

Goego. We haven't time. 

Workers can't throw away their holidays. 

Peax. Some water, Eunoe ; and then, my fine one, 
To take your rest again. Puss loves good lying. 
Come ; move, girl, move ; some water — water first. 
Look how she brings it ! Now, then ; — hold, hold, careless ; 
Not quite so fast ; you're wetting all my gown. 
There ; that'll do. Now, please the gods, I'm washed. 
The key of the great chest — where's that ? Go fetch it. 

[Exit Eunoe. 
Goego. Praxinoe, that gown with the full skirts 
Becomes you mightily. What did it cost you ? 

Peax. Oh, don't remind me of it. More than one 
Or two good minas, besides time and trouble. 
Goego. All which you had forgotten. 
Peax. Ah, ha ! True ; 

That's good. You're quite right. 



THEOCKITUS. 83 

Re-enter Eunoe. 

Come ; my cloak, my cloak ; 
And parasol. There— help it on now, properly. 
(To the little boy.) Child, child, you cannot go. The horse 

will bite it ; 
The Horrid Woman's coming. Well, well, simpleton, 
Cry, if you will ; but you must not get lamed. 
Come, Gorgo. — Phrygia, take the child, and play with him ; 
And call the dog indoors, and lock the gate. [They go out. 

Powers, what a crowd ! how shall we get along ? 
Why, they're like ants ! countless ! innumerable ! 
Well, Ptolemy, you've done fine things, that's certain, 
Since the gods took your father. No one now-a-days 
Does harm to travelers as they used to do, 
After the Egyptian fashion, lying in wait, — 
Masters of nothing but detestable tricks ; 
And all alike, — a set of cheats and brawlers. 
Gorgo, sweet friend, what will become of us ? 
Here are the king's horse-guards ! Pray, my good man, 
Don't tread upon us so. See the bay horse ! 
Look how it rears ! It's like a great mad dog. 
How you stand, Eunoe ! It will throw him certainly ! 
How lucky that I left the child at home ! 

Gorgo. Courage, Praxinoe ; they have pass'd us now ; 
They've gone into the court-yard. 

Peax. Good ! I breathe again. 

I never could abide in all my life 
A horse and a cold snake. 

Gorgo. (addressing an old woman.) From court, mother? 

Old Woman. Yes, child. 

Gorgo. Pray, is it easy to get in ? 

Old Woman. The Greeks got into Troy. Everything's done 
By trying. [Exit Old Woman. 

Gorgo. Bless us ! How she bustles off ! 



84 A JAR OF. HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Why, the old woman's quite oracular. 
But women must know everything ; ev'n what Juno 
Wore on her wedding-day. See now, Praxinoe, 
How the gate's crowded. 

Peax. Frightfully indeed. 

Give me your hand, dear Gorgo ; and do you 
Hold fast of Eutychis's, Eunoe. 
Don't let her go ; don't stir an inch ; and so 
We'll all squeeze in together. Stick close now. 
Oh me ! oh me ! my veil's torn right in two ! 
Do take care, my good man, and mind my cloak. 

Man. 'Twas not my fault ; but I'll take care. 

Peax. What heaps ! 

They drive like pigs ! 

Man. Courage, old girl ! all's safe. 

Peax. Blessings upon you, sir, now and for ever, 
For taking care of us — A good, kind soul. 
How Eunoe squeezes us ! Do, child, make way 
For your own self. There ; now, we've all got in, 
As the man said, when he was put in prison. 

Gorgo. Praxinoe, do look there ! What lovely tapestry ! 
How fine and showy ! One would think the gods did it. 

Prax. Holy Minerva ! how those artists work ! 
How they do paint their pictures to the life ! 
The figures stand so like, and move so like ! 
They're quite alive, not work'd. Well, certainly, 
Man's a wise creature. See now — only look — 
See — lying on the silver couch, all budding, 
With the young down about his face ! Adonis ! 
Charming Adonis — charming ev'n in Acheron ! 

Second Man. Do hold your tongues there ; chatter, chatter, 
chatter. 
The turtles stun one with their yawning gabble. 

Gorgo. Hey-day ! Whence comes the man ? What is't 
to you, 



THEOCRITUS. 85 

If we do chatter ? Speak where you've a right. 
You're not the master here. And as for that, 
Our people are from Corinth, like Bellerophon. 
Our tongue's Peloponnesiac ; and we hope 
It's lawful for the Dorians to speak Doric ! 

Prax. We've but one master, by the Honey-sweet ! * 
And-don't fear you, nor all your empty blows. 

Gorgo. Hush, hush, Praxinoe ! — there's the Grecian girl, 
A most amazing creature, going to sing 
About Adonis ; she that sings so well 
The song of Sperchis : she'll sing something fine, 
I warrant. — See how sweetly she prepares ! 

THE SONG. 

Lady, who dost take delight 

In Golgos and the Erycian height, 

And in the Idalian dell, 

Venus, ever amiable ; 

Lo, the long-expected Hours, 

Slowest of the blessed powers, 

Yet who bring us something ever, 

Ceasing their soft dancing never, 

Bring thee back thy beauteous one 

From perennial Acheron. 

Thou, they say, from earth hast given 

Berenice place in heaven, 

Dropping to her woman's heart 

Ambrosia ; and for this kind part, 

Berenice's daughter — she 

That's Helen-like — Arsinoe, 

thou many-named and shrin'd, 

Is to thy Adonis kind. 

He has all the fruits that now 

Hang upon the timely bough : 

* An epithet applied by the Sicilians to Proserpine. 



86 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA, 

He lias green young garden-plots, 

Basketed in silver pots ; 

Syrian scents in alabaster, 

And whate'er a curious taster 

Could desire, that women make 

With oil or honey, of meal cake ; 

And all shapes of beast or bird, 

In the woods by huntsman stirr'd ; 

And a bower to shade his state 

Heap'd with dill, an amber weight ; 

And about him Cupids flying, 

Like young nightingales, that — trying 

Their new wings— go half afraid, 

Here and there, within the shade. 

See the gold ! The ebony see ! 

And the eagles in ivory, 

Bearing the young Trojan up 

To be filler of Jove's cup ; 

And the tapestry's purple heap, 

Softer than the feel of sleep ; 

Artists, contradict who can, 

Samian or Milesian. 

But another couch there is 

For Adonis, close to his ; 

Venus has it, and with joy 

Clasps again her blooming boy 

With a kiss that feels no fret, 

For his lips are downy yet. 

Happy with her love be she ; 

But to-morrow morn will we, 

With our locks and garments flowing, 

And our bosoms gently showing, 

Come and take him, in a throng, 

To the sea- shore, with this song : — 

Go, belov'd Adonis, go 



THEOCRITUS. 87 

Year by year thus to and fro ; 
Only privileged demigod ; 
There was no such open road 
For Atrides ; nor the great 
Ajax, chief infuriate ; 
Nor for Hector, noblest once 
Of his mother's twenty sons ; 
Nor Patroclus, nor the boy 
That returned from taken Troy ; 
Nor those older buried bones, 
. Lapiths and Deucalions ; 
Nor Pelopians, and their boldest ; 
Nor Pelasgians, Greece's oldest. 
Bless us then, Adonis dear, 
And bring us joy another year ; 
Dearly hast thou come again, 
And dearly shalt be welcomed then. 

Gokgo. Well ; if that's not a clever creature, trust me ! 
Lord ! what a quantity of things she knows ! 
And what a charming voice ! — 'Tis time to go, though, 
For there's my husband hasn't had his dinner, 
And you'd best come across him when he wants it ! 
Good-by, Adonis, darling. Come again. 




88 



A JAli OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA, 



CHAPTER Y. 

IHEOCEITUS.-CCoscluded.) 

SPECIMENS OF THE PATHOS AND PASTORAL OF THEOCRITUS. 

THE CYCLOPS IN LOYE. POETICAL FEELING AMONG UN- 
EDUCATED CLASSES IN THE SOUTH. PASSAGES FROM 

THEOCRITUS'S FIRST IDYLL. HIS VERSIFICATION AND 

MUSIC. PASTORAL OF BION AND MOSCHUS. 




AVING- seen 
the force aud 
comic humour of 
Theocritus, let us 
now, if we can, 
give something of a 
taste of his pathos, 
and conclude with 
him as the Prince 
of Pastoral. We 
shall find the one leading to the 
W% other, or rather identified with it, 
for Polyphemus was himself a 
shepherd, and all his imagery and 
associations are drawn from 
pastoral life. Our English, it is 
to be borne in mind, is not the 




■VfW** 



THEOCBITUS. 89 

Greek. The poet must have all the benefit of that 
admission. But at any rate we have done our best not 
to spoil the original with such artificial modes of speech 
as destroy all pathos ; and feeling has a common 
language everywhere, which he who is thoroughly moved 
by it, can never wholly misrepresent. 

The story is that of Polyphemus under the circum- 
stances alluded to in our second chapter. It is 
addressed to the poet's friend Nicias, and is the 
earliest evidence of that particular personal regard for 
the medical profession, which is so observable in the 
history of men of letters ; for Nicias was a physician. 

THE CYCLOPS IN LOTE. 

There is no other medicine against love, 
My Nicias, (so at least it seems to me,) 
Either to cure it or to calm, but song. 
That, that indeed is balmy to men's minds, 
And sweet ; but 'tis a balm rare to be found ; 
Though not by you, my friend, who are at once 
Physician, and belov'd by all the Nine. 

It was by this the Cyclops liv'd among us, 
I mean that ancient shepherd, Polypheme, 
Who lov'd the sea-nymph, when he budded first 
About the lips and curling temples ; — lov'd, 
Not in the little present-making style, 
With baskets of new fruit and pots of roses, 
But with consuming passion. Many a time 
Would his flocks go home by themselves at eve, 



90 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Leaving him wasting by the dark sea-shore ; 
And sunrise would behold him wasting still. 
Yet ev'n a love like his found balm in verse, 
For he would sit, and look along the sea. 
And from his rock pipe to some strain like this : — 

" my white love, my Galatea, why 
Avoid me thus ? whiter than the curd, 
Gentler than any lamb, fuller of play 
Than kids, yet bitterer than the bright young grape, 
You come sometimes, when sweet sleep holds me fast : 
You break away, when sweet sleep lets me loose ; 
Gone, like a lamb at sight of the grey wolf. 

" Sweet, I began to love you, when you first 
Came with my mother to the mountain side 
To gather hyacinths. I show'd the way ; 
And then, and afterwards, and to this hour, 
I could not cease to love you ; you, who care 
Nothing about my love — Great Jove ! no, nothing. 

" Fair one, I know why you avoid me thus : 
It is because one rugged eyebrow spreads 
Across my forehead, solitary and huge, 
Shading this eye forlorn. My nose, too, presses 
Flat tow'rds my lip. And yet, such as I am, 
I feed a thousand sheep ; and from them drink 
Excellent milk ; and never want for cheese 
In summer, nor in autumn, nor dead winter, 
Dairies I have, so full. I can play, too, 
Upon the pipe, so as no Cyclops can, 
Singing, sweet apple mine, of you and me, 
Often till midnight. And I keep for you 
Four bears' whelps, and eleven fawns with collars 
Come to me then, for you shall have them all. 



THEOCBITUS. 91 

Let the sea rake on the dull shore. Your nights 

Would be far sweeter here, well hous'd with me. 

The place is beautiful with laurel-trees, 

With cypresses, with ivy, and the vine, 

The dulcet vine : and here, too, is a stream, 

Heavenly to drink, the water is so cold. 

The woody iEtna sends it down to me 

Out of her pure white snows. Who could have this, 

And choose to live in the wild salt-sea waves ? 

Perhaps, when I am talking of my trees, 

You think me ruder than the trunks ? more rough ; 

More rugged-bodied ? Ah, they keep me warm ; 

They blaze upon my hearth ; yet, I could lose 

Warmth, life, and all, and burn in the same fire, 

Kather than dwell beside it without you. 

Nay, I could burn the eye from out my head, 

Though nothing else be dearer. 

" Oh, poor mc ! 
Alas ! that I was born a unless body, 
And cannot dive to you, and kiss your hand ; 
Or, if you grudg'd me that, bring you white lilies, 
And the fresh poppy with its thin red leaves. 
And yet not so ; for poppies grow in summer, 
Lilies in spring ; and so I could not, both. 
But should some coaster, sweetest, in his ship 
Come here to see me, I would learn to swim ; 
And then I might find out what joy there is 
In living, as you do, in the dark deeps. 

" Galatea, that you would but come ; 
And having come, forget, as I do now, 
Here where I sat me, to go home again ! 
You should keep sheep with me, and milk the dams, 
And press the cheese from the sharp-tasted curd. 
It is my mother that's to blame. She never 
Told you one kind, endearing thing of me, 



92 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Though she has seen me wasting day by day. 
My very head and feet, for wretchedness, 
Throb — and so let 'em ; for I too am wretched. 
Cyclops, Cyclops, where are thy poor senses ? 
Go to thy basket- making ; get their supper 
For the young lambs. 'Twere wiser in thee, far. 
Prize what thou hast, and let the lost sheep go. 
Perhaps thou'lt find another Galatea, 
Another, and a lovelier ; for at night 
Many girls call to me to come and play, 
And when they find me list'ning, they all giggle 
So that e'en I seem counted somebody." 

Thus Polyphemus medicined his love 
With pipe and song ; and found it ease him more 
Than all the balms he might have bought with gold. 

What say you, reader? Is not the monster 
touching ? Do we not accord with his self-pity ? feel 
for his throbbing pulse and his hopeless humility, and 
wish it were possible for a beauty to love a shepherd 
with one eye ? — For the poet, observe, with great 
address, has said nothing about the giant. He has 
sunk the man-mountain. We may rate him at what 
equivocal measure we please, and consider him a 
respectable primaeval sort of pastoral Orson. It appears 
to us, that there is no truer pathos of its kind in the 
whole circle of poetry than the passages about the sheep 
and wolf, the throbbing pulses just mentioned, and the 
lover's humble attempt to get a little consolation of 



THEOCKITUS. 93 

vanity out of the equivocal interest taken in him hy the 
" giggling" damsels at the foot of his hill. The word 
" giggle," which is the literal translation of the Greek 
word, and singularly like it in the main sound, would 
have been thought very bold by a conventional poet. 
Not so thought the poet whose truth to nature has 
made him immortal. 

We are to fancy the Sicilian girls on a summer 
night (all the world is out of door there on summer 
nights) calling to Polyphemus up the mountain. They 
live at the foot of it — of iEtna. They have heard him 
stirring in the trees. The stir ceases. They know he 
is listening; and in the silence of the glen below, he 
hears them laughing at his attention. Such scenes 
take place all over the world, where there is any 
summer, Britain included. We doubt whether Yirgil 
or Tasso would have ventured upon the word. But 
Ariosto would. Homer and Shakspeare would. So 
would Dante. So would Catullus, a very Greek man. 
And it would surely not have been avoided by the 
author of the Gentle Shepherd, whose perception of 
homely truth puts him on a par in this respect with the 
greatest truth poetical. 

This love-story of Polyphemus is pastoral poetry in 
its highest passionate condition. Of pastoral, in the 
sense in which it is generally understood, a briefer or 



94 A JAE OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

better specimen cannot be given tban in the opening 
passages of our poet's volume. You are in the circle 
of pastoral at once, and in one of its loveliest spots. 
You are in the open air under pine-trees by fountain- 
heads, in company with two born poets, goatherd and 
shepherd though they be; poets such as Burns and 
Allan Ramsay might have been, had they been born in 
Sicily. 

A word, before we proceed, in respect to that inter- 
fusion of eloquent and therefore sometimes elegant 
expression which has been charged on one of the most 
natural of poets as an affectation, but which, as lie treats 
it, is only in unison with the popular genius of the 
south. In Virgil it became a rhetorical mistake; an 
artificial flower stuck in the ground. In Theocritus it 
was the growth of the soil; myrtle and almond springing 
by the wayside. 

Poetical expression in humble life is to be found all 
over the south. In the instances of Burns, Ramsay, 
and others, the north also has seen it. Indeed, it is 
not a little remarkable, that Scotland, which is more 
northern than England, and possesses not even a night- 
ingale, has had more of it than its southern neighbour. 
What that is owing to, is a question ; perhaps to the 
very restrictions of John Knox and his fellows, and 
Nature's happy tendency to counteract them. Or it may 



THEOCKITUS. 95 

have originated in the wild and uncertain habits of 
highlanders and borderers. Certainly, the Scotch have 
shown a more genial and impulsive spirit in their songs 
and dances than the English. We have nothing among 
us like the Highland Fling, or the reel of Tulloch- 
gorum, or the songs of Gaberlunzie Men, Jolly 
Beggars, and The gucle man he cam' hame at e'en. 
But extremes meet ; and the Scotch, in their hardi- 
hood, their very poverty, and occasional triumphs over it 
in fits of excess, appear to have been driven by a jovial 
desperation into the vivacities inspired by the sunshine 
of the south. Yet the Irish are a still greater puzzle in 
this respect : for they are poorer ; their land is in the 
English latitude; and nevertheless the poetical feeling- 
is far more common and more eloquent among them, 
than with either of their neighbours. Their fertility of 
fancy and readiness of expression render them, in fact, 
very like a southern people ; and, if a doubt, alas ! did 
not arise that misfortune itself was their inspirer by 
sharpening their sensibility, would give an almost 
laughable corroboration to their claims of a Milesian 
descent. Now, the Italian peasantry to this day, 
particularly the Tuscan, exhibit, as they always did, a 
like poetical fancy, but with more elegance ; and so, we 
doubt not, did those of Greece and Sicily. The latter, 
in modern times, have been checked in their faculties by 



96 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

unfavourable government ; but in the time of Theocritus, 
the subjects of the overflowingly rich cities of Syracuse 
and Agrigentum must have been as willing and able to 
pour out all they felt, as so many well-fed thrushes and 
blackbirds ; and anybody at all acquainted with the less 
rich, but not ill-governed, Tuscan peasantry, knows 
well with how much eloquence, and even refinement, it 
is possible for people in humble life to express them- 
selves, when the language is favourable, and circum- 
stances not otherwise. Mr. Stewart Kose has given 
some amusing instances in his Letters from the North 
of Italy. Asking a Florentine servant if he understood 
some directions given him, the man said, " Yes, for he 
always spoke in relief" ("Che parlava sempre scolpito"). 
Nothing could be better expressed than this. Another 
time, his good-natured master, inquiring if he was 
comfortable on the coach-box, the servant answered that 
he was very well off; for " here," said he, " one springs 
it " (" che qui si molleggia "). The verb was coined for 
the occasion from the noun molla, a spring. Another 
man being asked the way to a particular house, told 
him to go straight forwards to the end of the street, and 
it would "tumble on his head." This is very Irish. 
An Italian acquaintance of Mr. Eose was passing through 
a street in Florence at serenade time, when he beheld a 
dog looking up at a female of his species in a balcony, 



THEOCBITUS. 97 

and at the same time scratching his ribs. One of the 
Florentine popnlace, who happened to he passing, 
stopped, and cried out, " He is in love, and playing the 
guitar, serenading the fair one " (" E innamorato ; suona 
la chitarra; fa la cucchiata alia hella"). A Eoman 
laquais de place (but he is a more sophisticate 
authority) once asked the same writer, on seeing him 
look at a wild-flower in the fields, whether it was the 
signor's " pleasure that he should cull it?" (" Commanda 
che lo carpa ? ") For our poetical word " cull," though 
its meaning is different, may represent the unvernacular 
elegance of carpa, pluck. The laquais de place, it 
seems, "talked like a cardinal." We have ourselves, how- 
ever, heard a coachman's wife, who was a Eoman, pour 
forth a stream of elegant language that astonished us. 

A neighbour of ours, near Fiesole, a fine old Tuscan 
peasant, who was clipping a hedge, said to us one day, 
as we exchanged salutation with him, "I am trimming 
the bush's beard" ("F6 labarba al bosco"). But a Floren- 
tine female servant, who had the child of an acquaintance 
in her arms, and who, like the generality of her country- 
women, was perfectly unaffected, carried the aristocratic 
refinement of her style higher, perhaps, than any of the 
persons mentioned. Some remarks being made respect- 
ing the countenances of her master's children, she asked 
us whether the one in her arms did not form an excep- 

7 



98 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

tion ; whether, in fact, we did not think that it had " a 
kind of plebeian look " (" un certo aspetto plebeo "). 

So much for the ability of the humbler orders to 
speak with force and delicacy, when sensibility gives 
them the power of expression, and animal spirits the 
courage to use it. 

PASSAGES FROM THE FIRST IDYLL OF THEOCRITUS. 

In Theocritus's opening poem, the time of day is a 
hot noon, and a shepherd and goatherd appear to have 
been piping under their respective trees, we suppose at 
a reasonable distance. The shepherd goes towards the 
goatherd, who seems to stop playing ; and on approach- 
ing him commences the dialogue by observing, that 
there is something extremely pleasant in the whisper of 
the pine under which he is sitting, but not less so 
was the something he was playing just now on his 
pipe. He declares that he is the next best player 
after Pan himself ; and that if Pan were to have a ram 
for his prize, the ewe would of necessity fall to the 
goatherd. 

Sweet sings the rustling of your pine to-day 
Over the- fountain-heads ; and no less sweet 
Upon the pipe play you. 

The Greek word for rustling, or rather whispering — 
psithurisma — is much admired. "Whispering" is 



THEOCRITUS. 99 

hardly strong enough, and not so long drawn out. 
There is the continuous whisper in psithurisma. The 
goatherd returns the compliment by telling the shepherd 
that his singing during such hot weather (for we must 
always keep in mind the accessories implied by good 
poets) is sweeter than the flowing abundance of the 
waterfall out of the rock. The two verses in which this 
is expressed are a favourite quotation, on account of the 
imitative beauty of the second sentence. We know not 
whether they would equally please every critical ear, for 
"doctors," even of music, "differ." Much of the 
divine writing of Beethoven seems to have been as 
appalling at first to the orchestral world, as olives are to 
most palates ; and there is a passage in Mozart which to 
this day is a choke-pear to the scientific, albeit they 
acknowledge that he intended it to be written as it 
stands. For our parts, we have great faith in the ultra- 
delights perceptible in the enormities of Beethoven, 
Mozart, and olives ; and suspect there is more music in 
the very hissing and clatter in the sentence in Theocritus, 
to say nothing of its obvious rush and leaping, than has 
been quite perceived by every scholar who has praised it. 
It is a pity that all musical people do not read Greek ; 
for they deserve to do so ; which is what cannot be said 
of all scholars. Perhaps some of them would be glad to 
see the passage, even in English characters. We 

L OF C. 



100 A JAB OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

remember, before we knew any others, the delight we 
used to take in the Greek quotations, thus printed in 
the novels of Smollett and Fielding, and shall make no 
further apology for a like bit of typography. We shall 
first give the measure of the original verse in corre- 
sponding English hexameters. The English language 
does not take kindly to the measure. The hexameter is 
too salient and cantering for it. But once and away 
the anomaly may be tolerated, especially for illustration's 
sake. The passage in English words may run thus : — 

Sweeter, shepherd, thy singing is, than the sonorous 
Gush from above of the waterfall out of the rock-stone. 

There is no imitative attempt of another sort in this 
version. It is given simply to show a general likeness 
to the measure. The sound of the original, as everybody 
will discern, is much more to the purpose, though judges 
will differ perhaps as to whether it is more effective in 
softness or in strength, in leap or in volume. We 
are obliged to adapt the spelling, in one or two 
instances, to the necessities of the pronunciation. The 
literal Greek order of the words would, in English, be : — 

Sweeter, shepherd, the thy song, than the sonorous 
That (or yonder) from the rock-stone much flows from above 
water. 

Hadion o poiman to teon melos e to kataches 

Teen appo tas petras kataleibetai heupsothen heudor. 



THEOCEITUS. 101 

Kataleibetai (much, or strongly, or abundantly 
flows), with the accent on the dipthong ei, is certainly a 
fine strenuous word, at once strong and liquid, and 
appreciable by any ear. And heupsothen heudor (from 
above water), with its two successive w's, will be equally 
admitted, we think, to express the constant yearning rush 
of the water from inside the well. 

The goatherd promises the shepherd, if he will sing 
to him, the gift of a huge wine-cup, adorned with 
figures. The following exquisite picture is among them. 
We give it in the version of Mr. M. J. Chapman, a 
living writer, not unworthy his venerable namesake, 
and by far the best translator of Theocritus that has 
appeared : — 

"EvrocrQev §k yvva, &c. 
With flowing robe, and Lydian head-dress on, 
Within, a woman to the life is done — 
An exquisite design ! On either side 
Two men with flowing locks each other chide, 
By turns contending for the woman's love ; 
But not a whit her mind their pleadings move : 
One while she gives to this a glance and smile, 
And turns and smiles on that another while. 

To the apparently formidable objection made by some 
critics, that no artist could make a woman look on two 
people one after the other, Mr. Chapman happily 
answers : — " Theocritus described an image that was 
before his mind's eye, and for so doing he needs no 



102 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

defence ; but the matter-of-fact critic may be able, 
perhaps, to obtain an approximation to the idea, by 
considering attentively the print of ' Garrick divided 
between Tragedy and Comedy.' " * 

This picture is followed by one of an old able-bodied 
fisherman at his labours, with the muscles of his neck 
swelling like those of a strong young man ; and to this 
succeeds a third, as good as that of the Coquette — some 
will think better. It is a boy so intent upon making 
a trap, that he is not aware of the presence of two foxes, 
one of whom is meditating to abduct his breakfast. 

A little boy sits by the thorn-edge trim, 

To watch the grapes — two foxes watching him ; 

(The version of this line is original in the turn of it, and 
very happy.) 

One through the ranges of the vine proceeds, 
And on the hanging vintage slily feeds ; 
The other plots and vows his scrip to search, 
And for his breakfast leave him in the lurch. 

Meanwhile he twines, and to a rush fits well 
A locust-trap, with stalks of asphodel ; 
And twines away with such absorbing glee, 
Of scrip or vines he never thinks, not he ! 

— Chapman, p. 8. 

* The Greek Pastoral Poets, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, done 
into English by M. J. Chapman, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, 
pp. 7, 331. — We like the good faith of Mr. Chapmaa's "done into 

English." 



THEOCRITUS. 103 

In the pastorals of Bion we know nothing of pro- 
minent interest, though he is eloquent and worth 
reading. But in those of Moschus there is a passage 
which has found an echo in all bosoms, like the sigh 
that answers a wind over a churchyard. It is in the 
Elegy on Bion's death : — 

At, al, rat iia\a%ai \itv \irdv Kara kccttov oXwvtcii, 
"H to, x^upa okXiva, to t tvQaXeg ovXov avrjOov, 
"Tarepov av Zojovti, icai tig hog dXXo fyvovrv 
"Afi/J.eg d" bi fteyaXoi, Kai tcaprspoi, rj <jo<poi dvdpeg, 
'Ottttots itpara Sravcofitg, avaKooi 'iv yQovl KoTXa, 
~E'vdoiAtg ev fidXa [xaicpbv, drspfiova, vrjypsTOV vtzvov. 

—Idyll iii. v. 104. 

Alas ! when mallows in the garden die, 
Green parsley, or the crisp luxuriant dill, 
They live again, and flower another year ; 
But we, how great soe'er, or strong, or wise, 
When once ive die, sleep, in the senseless earth, 
A long, an endless, unawakeable sleep. 

The beautiful original of these verses, every word so 
natural and sincere, so well placed, and the whole so 
affecting, may stand by the side of any poetry, even that 
of the passage in the Book of Job too well known to most 
of us. But we confess that after such Greek verses as 
these, and the fresh flowers of Theocritus, we never 
have the heart to quote the artificial ones of Virgil, 
critically accomplished as they are. They are the 
pattern of too many others which brought the word 



104 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Pastoral into disrepute ; and it is not pleasant to be 
forced to object to a great name. 

Virgil, however, appears to have been very fond of 
the country ; and after he was settled in Home, longed 
for it, like Horace, with a feeling which produced some 
of his most admired passages ; things which other 
metropolitan poets and tired court gentlemen have 
delighted to translate. Such are the Delights of a 
Country Life, versified out of the Georgics by Cowley, 
Sir William Temple, Dryden, and others, lines of which 
remain for ever in the memory. 

Oh happy (if his happiness he knows) 
The country swain, &c. 

He has no great riches, or visitors, or cares, &c, but his life 

Does with substantial blessedness abound, 
And the soft icings of peace cover him round. 

That is Cowley, who betters his original. 

In life's cool vale let my low scene be laid ; 
Cover me, gods! with Tempers thickest shade. 

So again of the shepherd : — 

— In th' evening of a fair sunny day, 
With joy he sees his flocks and kids to play, 
And loaded kine about his cottage stand, 
Inviting with known sound the milker's hand ; 
And when from wholesome labour he doth come, 
With wishes to be there, and wish'd for home, 



THEOCRITUS. 105 

He meets at door the softest human blisses, 

If is chaste ivife's welcome, and dear children s kisses. 

Of a similar kind is Cowley's translation of Claudian's 
Old Man of Verona: — 

Happy the man who his whole time doth bound 

Within th' enclosure of his little ground. — 

Him no false distant lights, by fortune set, 

Could ever into foolish wanderings get ; — 

No change of consuls marks to him the year : 

The change of seasons is his calendar : 

The cold and heat winter and summer shows ; 

Autumn by fruits, and spring by flow'rs, he knows : — 

A neighb'ring wood born with himself he sees, 

And loves his old contemporary trees. 

The most original bit of Pastoral in Virgil (if it be 
his) is to be found in a poem of doubtful authority called 
the Gnat (Culex), which has been beautifully translated by 
Spenser. It is a true picture, combining the elegance of 
Claude with the minuteness of the Flemish painters : — 

The fiery sun was mounted now on height 

Up to the heavenly towers, and shot each where 

Out of his golden charet glistering light ; 
And fayre Aurora, with her rosie haire, 

The hatefull darkness now had put to flight ; 
"When as the shepherd, seeing day appeare, 

His little goats gan drive out of their stalls, 

To feede abroad, where pasture best befalls. 

To an high mountain's top he with them went, 
Where thickest grasse did cloath the open hills : 



106 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

They, now amongst the woods and thicketts ment, 
Now in the vallies wandring at their wills, 

Spread themselves farre abroad through each descent ; 
Some on the soft green grasse feeding their fills ; 

Some, clambering through the hollow cliffes on hy, 

Nibble the bushie shrubs which growe thereby. 

Others the utmost boughs of trees doe crop, 

And brouze the woodbine twigges that freshly bud ; 

This with full bit doth catch the utmost top 
Of some soft willow or new-growen stud ; 

That with sharpe teeth the bramble leaves doth lop, 
And chaw the tender prickles in her cud ; 

The whiles another high doth oveiiooke 

Her own like image in a cristall brook. 

This is picturesque and charming. Yet Virgil, 
though a country-loving, and also an agricultural poet, 
would have been nothing as a pastoral poet without 
Theocritus, and, as it was, lie spoiled him. We shall 
see in what manner, when we come to speak of Pope. 




( 107 ) 



CHAPTER VI. 

NORMAN TIMES-LEGEND OF KING ROBERT. 

HOW KING ROBERT OF SICILY WAS DISPOSSESSED OF HIS 
THRONE ; AND WHO SAT UPON IT.— HIS WRATH, SUFFERINGS, 
AND REPENTANCE. 

N the glance 
at the anci- 
ent history 
of Sicily 
in our third 
chapter, we 
have seen that the 
Greek and Roman 
sway was succeeded 
by that of the Sara- 
cens. They were masters 
of the island for the space 
of two hundred years, but 
have left no memorials, 
with the exception of a 
building or two, and traces 
of Arabic in the Sicilian 




tongue. 



The island was 



108 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

then conquered by a handful of Norman gentlemen, 
who had obtained possession of Naples, and whose 
history would be romantic enough to be worth repeat- 
ing, if it were anything but a succession of wars. Their 
wonderful ascendancy, and no less extraordinary per- 
sonal prowess, are supposed by some, not without 
reason, to have given rise to much of the gigantic fable 
of the Orlandos and other peers of Charlemagne, who 
were all Frenchmen. 

As an old ruin, therefore, standing in some spot 
surrounded by architecture of different orders, will some- 
times be found to be the sole representative of a former 
age, we shall make the good old legend of King Kobert, 
in this our Sicilian and Pastoral Sketch-book, stand for 
the whole Norman portion of its chronology. It is 
not military, except in the brusque self-sufficiency with 
which the character of King Robert sets out ; but it is 
emphatically what we understand by Gothic ; which, in 
modern parlance, implies the character of the interval 
between ancient and modern times. The Greek Sicilian 
poets, could they have foreseen it, would have loved it ; 
and their successors, the pastoral writers of modern 
times, of whom we have afterwards to speak, unques- 
tionably did so, whenever they met with it among their 
old reading. Shakspeare would have made a divine play 
of it, for it is very dramatic. Fancy what he would have 



NOEMAN TIMES — LEGEND OF KING ROBERT. 109 

clone with the angel, and the court fool, and the pathos ! 
Oh, that we had had but time to try even to dramatize it 
ourselves. 

Who King Robert of Sicily may have been, in com- 
mon earthly history — whether intended to shadow forth 
one of the aforesaid Norman chieftains who obtained 
possession of that island, or one of the various dukes 
who contend for the honour of being called Robert the 
Devil, or whether he was Robert of Anjou, night Robert 
the Wise, the friend of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and 
father of the calumniated Joanna — we must leave to 
antiquaries to determine. Suffice to say, that in history 
angelical, and in the depths of one of the very finest 
kinds of truth, he was King Robert of Sicily, brother of 
Pope Urban, and of the Emperor Valemond. A like 
story has been told of the Emperor Jovinian (whoever 
that prince may have been) ; and we shall not dispute 
that something of the kind may have occurred to him 
also ; since very strange things happen to the most 
haughty of princes, if we did but know their whole 
lives ; not excepting their being taken for fools by their 
people. We shall avail ourselves of any light which 
the histories of the king and the emperor may serve to 
throw on each other. 

Writers, then, inform us, that King Robert of 
Sicily, brother of Pope Urban and of the Emperor 



110 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Valemond, was a prince of great courage and renown, 
but of a temper so proud and impatient, that he did not 
choose to bend his knee to Heaven itself, but would sit 
twirling his beard, and looking with something worse 
than indifference round about him, during the gravest 
services of the church. 

One day, while he was present at vespers on the eve 
of St. John, his attention was excited to some words in 
the Magnificat, in consequence of a sudden dropping 
of the choristers' voices. The words were these . 
" Deposuit potentes de secle, et exaltavit hinniles." (" He 
hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath 
exalted the humble.") Being far too great and warlike a 
prince to know anything about Latin, he asked a chap- 
lain near him the meaning of these words ; and being 
told what it was, observed, that such expressions were 
no better than an old song, since men like himself were 
not so easily put down, much less supplanted by poor 
creatures whom people call " humble." 

The chaplain, doubtless out of pure astonishment 
and horror, made no reply; and his majesty, partly 
from the heat of the weather, and partly to relieve him- 
self from the rest of the service, fell asleep. 

After some lapse of time, the royal " sitter in the 
seat of the scornful," owing, as he thought, to the 
sound of the organ, but in reality to a great droning 



NORMAN TIMES— LEGEND OF KING ROBERT. Ill 

fly in his ear, woke up in more than his usual state of 
impatience ; and he was preparing to vent it, when, 
to his astonishment, he perceived the church empty. 
Every soul was gone, excepting a deaf old woman who 
was turning up the cushions. He addressed her to no 
purpose : he spoke louder and louder, and was pro- 
ceeding, as well as rage and amaze would let him, to 
try if he could walk out of the church without a dozen 
lords before him, when, suddenly catching a sight of his 
face, the old woman uttered a cry of " Thieves ! " and 
shuffling away, closed the door behind her. 

King Eobert looked at the door in silence, then 
round about him at the empty church, then at himself. 
His cloak of ermine was gone. The coronet was taken 
from his cap. The very jewels from his fingers. 
" Thieves, verily ! " thought the king, turning white 
from shame and rage. " Here is conspiracy — rebellion ! 
This is that sanctified traitor, the duke. Horses shall 
tear them all to pieces. What, ho, there ! Open the 
door for the king ! " 

" For the constable, you mean," said a voice through 
the key-hole. " You're a pretty fellow ! " 

The king said nothing. 

" Thinking to escape, in the king's name," said the 
voice, " after hiding to plunder his closet. We've got 
you." 



112 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA, 

Still the king said nothing. 

The sexton could not refrain from another jibe at 
his prisoner : 

"J see you there," said he, "by the big lamp, 
grinning like a rat in a trap. How do you like your 
bacon ? " 

Now, whether King Eobert was of the blood of that 
Norman chief who felled his enemy's horse with a blow 
of his fist, we know not ; but certain it is, that the 
only answer he made the sexton was by dashing his 
enormous foot against the door, and bursting it open 
in his teeth. The sexton, who felt as if a house had 
given him a blow in the face, fainted away ; and the 
king, as far as his sense of dignity allowed him, hurried 
to his palace, which was close by. 

" Well," said the porter, "what do you want ?" 

"Stand aside, fellow!" roared the king, pushing 
back the door with the same gigantic foot. 

" Go to the devil !" said the porter, who was a stout 
fellow too, and pushed the king back before he expected 
resistance. The king, however, was too much for him. 
He felled him to the ground ; and half strode, half rushed 
into the palace, followed by the exasperated janitor. 

" Seize him ! " cried the porter. 

"On your lives!" cried the king. "Look at me, 
fellow: — who am I?" 



N0KMAN TIMES — LEGEND OF KING EOBERT. 113 

" A mad beast and fool ; that's what you are," cried 
the porter ; " and you're a dead man for coming drunk 
into the palace, and hitting the king's servants. Hold 
him fast." 

In came the guards, with an officer at their head, 
who was going to visit his mistress, and had been 
dressing his curls at a looking-glass. He had the 
looking-glass in his hand. 

" Captain Francavilla," said the king, "is the world 
run mad ? or what is it ? Do your rebels pretend not 
even to know me. Go before me, sir, to my rooms." 
And as he spoke, the king shook off his assailants, as a 
lion does curs, and moved onwards. 

Captain Francavilla put his finger gently before the 
king to stop him ; and then looking with a sort of 
staring indifference in his face, said in a very mincing 
tone, " Some madman." 

King Robert tore the looking-glass from the cap- 
tain's hand, and looked himself in the face. It ivas not 
his own face. It was another man's face, very hot and 
vulgar; and had something in it at once melancholy 
and ridiculous. 

"By the living God !" exclaimed Bobert, "here is 
witchcraft ! I am changed." And, for the first time 
in his life, a sensation of fear came upon him, but 
nothing so great as the rage and fury that remained. 

8 



114 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

All the world believed in witchcraft, as well as King 
Robert ; but they had still more certain proofs of the 
existence of drunkenness and madness. The royal 
household had seen the king come forth from church as 
usual ; and they were ready to split their sides for 
laughter at the figment of this raving impostor, pre- 
tending to be his majesty changed! 

"Bring him in — bring him in!" now exclaimed 
other voices, the news having got to the royal apart- 
ments ; " the king wants to see him." 

King Robert was brought in ; and there, amidst 
roars of laughter (for courts were not quite such well- 
bred places then as they are now), he found himself 
face to face with another King Robert, seated on his 
throne, and as like his former self as he himself was 
unlike, but with more dignity. 

" Hideous impostor ! " exclaimed Robert, rushing 
forward to tear him down. 

The court, at the word ft hideous," roared with 
greater laughter than before ; for the king, in spite of 
his pride, was at all times a handsome man ; and there 
was a strong feeling at present, that he had never in his 
life looked so well. 

Robert, when half way to the throne, felt as if a 
palsy had smitten him. He stopped, and essayed to 
vent his rage, but could not speak. 



NORMAN TIMES— LEGEND OF KING ROBERT. 115 

The figure on the throne looked him steadily in 
the face. Robert thought it was a wizard, hut; hated 
far more than he feared it ; for he was of great 
courage. 

It was an Angel. 

But the Angel was not going to disclose himself yet, 
nor for a long time. Meanwhile, he behaved, on the 
occasion, very much like a man ; we mean, like a man 
of ordinary feelings and resentments, though still mixed 
with a dignity beyond what had been before observed in 
the Sicilian monarch. Some of the courtiers attributed 
it to a sort of royal instinct of contrast, excited by the 
claims of the impostor ; but others (by the Angel's con- 
trivance) had seen him, as he came out of the church, 
halt suddenly, with an abashed and altered visage, 
before the shrine of St. Thomas, as if supernaturally 
struck with some visitation from Heaven for his pride 
and unbelief. The rumour flew about on the instant, 
and was confirmed by an order given from the throne, 
the moment the Angel seated himself upon it, for a gift 
of hitherto unheard-of amount to the shrine itself. 

" Since thou art royal-mad," said the new sovereign, 
" and in truth a very king of idiots, thou shalt be 
crowned and sceptred with a cap and bauble, and be my 
fool." 

Robert was still tongue-tied. He tried in vain to 



116 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

speak — to roar out liis disgust and defiance ; and half 
mad, indeed, with the inability, pointed with his 
quivering finger to the inside of his mouth, as if in 
apology to the beholders for not doing it. Fresh shouts 
of laughter made his brain seem to reel within him. 

"Fetch the cap and bauble," said the sovereign, 
M and let the King of Fools have his coronation." 

Robert felt that he must submit to what he thought 
the power of the devil. He began even to have glimpses 
of a real though hesitating sense of the advantage of 
securing friendship on the side of Heaven. But rage 
and indignation were uppermost ; and while the attend- 
ants were shaving his head, fixing the cap, and jeeringly 
dignifying him with the bauble-sceptre, he was racking 
his brain for schemes of vengeance. What exasperated 
him most of all, next to the shaving, was to observe, 
that those who had flattered him most when a king, 
were the loudest in their contempt, now that he was the 
court-zany. One pompous lord in particular, with a high 
and ridiculous voice, which continued to laugh when all 
the rest had done, and produced fresh peals by the 
continuance, was so excessively provoking, that Robert, 
who felt his vocal and muscular powers restored to him 
as if for the occasion, could not help shaking his fist at 
the grinning slave, and crying out, " Thou beast, Terra- 
nova ! " which, in all but the person so addressed, only 



NORMAN TIMES — LEGEND OF KING ROBERT. 117 

produced additional merriment. At length, the king 
ordered the fool to be taken away, in order to sup with 
the dogs. Kobert was stupefied ; but he found himself 
hungry against his will, and gnawed the bones which 
had been chucked away by his nobles. 

The proud King Kobert of Sicily lived in this way 
for two years, always raging in his mind, always sullen 
in his manners, and subjected to every indignity which 
his quondam favourites could heap on him, without the 
power to resent it. For the new monarch seemed unjust 
to him only. He had all the humiliations, without any 
of the privileges, of the cap and bells, and was the 
dullest fool ever heard of. All the notice the king took 
of him consisted in his asking, now and then, in full 
court, when everything was silent, " Well, fool, art thou 
still a king ?" Kobert, for some weeks, loudly answered 
that he was ; but, finding that the answer was but a 
signal for a roar of laughter, he converted his speech 
into the silent dignity of a haughty and royal attitude ; 
till, observing that the laughter was greater at this 
dumb show, he ingeniously adopted a manner which 
expressed neither defiance nor acquiescence, and the 
Angel for some time let him alone. 

Meantime, everybody but the unhappy Kobert blessed 
the new, or, as they supposed him, the altered king : 
for everything in the mode of government was changed. 



118 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Taxes were light ; the poor had plenty ; work was rea- 
sonable ; the nobles themselves were expected to work 
after their fashion — to study, to watch zealously over the 
interests of their tenants, to travel, to bring home new 
books and innocent luxuries. Half the day throughout 
Sicily was given to industry, and half to healthy and 
intellectual enjoyment ; and the inhabitants became at 
once the manliest and tenderest, the gayest and most 
studious people in the world. Wherever the king went, 
he was loaded with benedictions ; and the fool heard 
them, and began to wonder tchat the devil the devil had 
to do with appearances so extraordinary. And thus, for 
the space of time we have mentioned, he lived wonder- 
ing, and sullen, and hating, and hated, and despised. 

At the expiration of these two years, or nearly so, 
the king announced his intention of paying a visit to his 
brother the Pope and his brother the Emperor, the 
latter agreeing to come to Borne for the purpose. He 
went accordingly with a great train, clad in the most 
magnificent garments, all but the fool, who was arrayed 
in fox-tails, and put side by side with an ape, dressed 
like himself. The people poured out of their houses, 
and fields, and vineyards, all struggling to get a sight 
of the king's face, and to bless it ; the ladies strewing 
flowers, and the peasants' wives holding up their rosy 
children, which last sight seemed particularly to delight 



NORMAN TIMES— LEGEND OF KING EOBERT. 119 

the sovereign. The fool, bewildered, came after the 
court pages, by the side of his ape, exciting shouts of 
laughter ; though some persons were a little astonished 
to think how a monarch so kind and considerate to all 
the rest of the world, should be so hard upon a sorry 
fool. But it was told them, that this fool was the most 
perverse and insolent of men towards the prince him- 
self ; and then, although their wonder hardly ceased, it 
was full of indignation against the unhappy wretch, and 
he was loaded with every kind of scorn and abuse. The 
proud King Eobert seemed the only blot and disgrace 
upon the island. 

The fool had still a hope, that when his Holiness 
the Pope saw him, the magician's arts would be at an 
end ; for though he had had no religion at all, properly 
speaking, he had retained something even of a super- 
stitious faith in the highest worldly form of it. The 
good Pope, however, beheld him without the least recog- 
nition ; so did the Emperor ; and when he saw them 
both gazing with unfeigned admiration at the exalted 
beauty of his former altered self, and not with the old 
faces of pretended good-will and secret dislike, a sense 
of awe and humility, for the first time, fell gently upon 
him. Instead of getting as far as possible from his 
companion the ape, he approached him closer and closer, 
partly that he might shroud himself under the very 



120 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

shadow of his insignificance, partly from a feeling of 
absolute sympathy, and a desire to possess, if not one 
friend in the world, at least one associate who was not 
an enemy. 

It happened that day, that it was the same day on 
which, two years ago, Kobert had scorned the words in 
the Magnificat. Vespers were performed before the 
sovereigns : the music and the soft voices fell softer as 
they came to the words ; and Eobert again heard, with 
far different feelings, "He hath put down the mighty 
from their seat, and exalted the humble." Tears gushed 
into his eyes, and, to the astonishment of the court, the 
late brutal fool was seen with his hands clasped upon 
his bosom in prayer, and the water pouring down his 
face in floods of penitence. Holier feelings than usual 
had pervaded all hearts that day. The king's favourite 
chaplain had preached from the text which declares 
charity to be greater than faith or hope. The Emperor 
began to think mankind really his brothers. The Pope 
wished that some new council of the church would 
authorise him to set up, instead of the Jewish Ten 
Commandments, and in more glorious letters, the new, 
eleventh, or great Christian commandment, — " Behold 
I give unto you a new commandment, Love one 
another.'' In short, Rome felt that day like angel- 
governed Sicily. 



NORMAN TIMES — LEGEND OF KING ROBERT. 121 

When the service was over, the unknown King 
Robert's behaviour was reported to the unsuspected 
King- Angel, who had seen it but said nothing. The 
sacred interloper announced his intention of giving the 
fool his discharge ; and he sent for him accordingly, 
having first dismissed every other person. King Eobert 
came in his fool's-cap and bells, and stood humbly at a 
distance before the strange great charitable unknown, 
looking on the floor and blushing. He had the ape by 
the hand, who had long courted his good-will, and who, 
having now obtained it, clung to his human friend in a 
way that, to a Roman, might have seemed ridiculous, 
but to the Angel, was affecting. 

"Art thou still a king?" said the Angel, putting 
the old question, but without the word " fool." 

" I am a fool," said King Kobert, " and no king." 

" What wouldst thou, Kobert ? " returned the Angel, 
in a mild voice. 

King Robert trembled from head to foot, and said, 
" Even what thou wouldst, mighty and good stranger, 
whom I know not how to name, — hardly to look at ! " 

The stranger laid his hand on the shoulder of King 
Robert, who felt an inexpressible calm suddenly diffuse 
itself over his being. He knelt down, and clasped his 
hands to thank him. 

" Not to me," interrupted the Angel, in a grave, but 



122 



A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 



sweet voice ; and kneeling down by the side of Robert, 
he said, as if in church, " Let us pray." 

King Robert prayed, and the Angel prayed, and 
after a few moments, the king looked up, and the Angel 
was gone ; and then the king knew that it was an Angel 
indeed. 

And his own likeness returned to King Robert, but 
never an atom of his pride ; and after a blessed reign, 
he died, disclosing this history to his weeping nobles, 
and requesting that it might be recorded in the Sicilian 
Annals. 




( 123 ) 



CHAPTER VII. 

ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL. 

TASSO'S ERMINIA AMONG THE SHEPHERDS, AND ODE ON THE 

GOLDEN AGE. GUARINl's RETURN OF SPRING. SHEPHERD' S 

VISION OF THE HUNDRED MAIDENS IN SPENSER. SAD SHEP- 

HEED OF BEN JONSOX. 



^"&r. <*«.,•; 




HE best pas- 
toral is often 
written when 
the author 
least intends 
it. A com- 
pleter feeling 
of the coun- 
try and of a 
shepherd's 
life is given 
us in a single 
passage of the 
Jerusalem 
De liver ed, 



124 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

where Erminia finds herself among a set of peaceful 

villagers, than in the whole Aminta — beautiful, too, 

as the latter is in many respects, and containing the 

divine ode on the Golden Age, the crown of all pastoral 

aspiration. That, indeed, carries everything, even truth 

itself, before it ; saving the truth of man's longing after 

a state of happiness compatible with his desires. The 

first line of it, the most beautiful of sighs, is familiar 

as a proverb in the lips of Italy, and of the lovers of 

Italy :— 

bella eta de l'oro ! 

Non gia perche di latte 

Sen corse il flume, e stillo mele il bosco ; 

Non perche i frutti loro 

Dier da 1' aratro intatte 

Le terre, e i serpi errar senz' ira o tosco ; 

Non perche nuvol fosco 

Non spiego allor suo velo, 

Ma in primavera eterna 

Ch' ora s' accende, e verna, 

Rise di luce e di sereno il cielo, 

Ne porto peregrino 

guerra o nierce a gli altrui lidi il piuo. 

Ma sol perche quel vano 

Nome senza soggetto, 

Quell' idolo d' errori, idol d' inganno, 

Quel che dal volgo insano 

Onor poscia fii detto, 

Che di nostra natura il feo tiranno, 

Non mischiava il suo affanno 

Fra le liete dolcezze 



Italian and English pastoeal. 125 

De 1' amoroso gregge ; 

Ne fu sua dura legge 

Nota a quell' alme in libertate avvezze : 

Ma legge aurea e felice, 

Che natura scolpi, — s' ei piace, ei lice. 

lovely age of gold ! 
Not that the rivers roll'd 
With milk, or that the woods wept honey- dew ; 
Not that the ready ground 
Produced without a wound, 
Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew ; 
Not that a cloudless blue 
For ever was in sight, 
Or that the heaveu, which burns 
And now is cold by turns, 
Look'd out in glad and everlasting light ; 
No, nor that even the insolent ships from far 
Brought war to no new lands, nor riches worse than 
war. 

But solely that that vain 
And breath-invented pain, 
That idol of mistake, that worshipp'd cheat, 
That Honour — since so call'd 
By vulgar minds appall'd, 
Play'd not the tyrant with our nature yet. 
It had not come to fret 
The sweet and happy fold 
Of gentle human-kind ; 
Nor did its hard law bind 
Souls nursed in freedom ; but that law of gold, 
That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted, 
Which nature's own haud wrote — What pleases, is 
permitted. 



128 A JAE OF HONEY FEOM MOUNT HYBLA* 

Guarini, who wrote his Pastor F'ulo in emulation of 
the Aminta, undertook to show that these regrets were 
immoral, and agreeably to an Italian fashion, made at 
once a grave rebuke and a literal rhyming parody of the 
original, in an ode beginning with the same words, and 
repeating most of them ! His version of " What pleases, 
is permitted," is " Take pleasure, if permitted ! " as if 
Tasso did not know all about that side of the question, 
and was not prepared to be quite as considerate in his 
moral conduct and his discountenance of rakes and 
seducers as Guarini : whose poem, after all, incurred 
charges of licence and temptation, from which that of 
his prototype was free; — an old conventional story! 
All which Tasso did, was to put into the mouths of his 
shepherds, themselves an ideal people, a wish which is 
felt by the whole world — namely, that duty and incli- 
nation could be more reconciled to innocence than they 
are ; and the world has shown that it agreed with his 
honest sighs, and not with the pick-thank common- 
places of his reprover ; for it has treasured his beau- 
tiful ode in its memory, and forgotten its insulting 
echo. 

Nevertheless, there are fine things in Guarini, and 
such as the world has consented to remember, though 
not of this all-affecting sort. One of these is the 
address to the woods, beginning — 



ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL. 127 

Care selve beate, 

E voi, solinghi e taciturni orrori, 

Di riposo e cli pace alberghi veri : — 

an exordium, which somebody (was it Mrs. Katherine 
Phillips, the "matchless Orinda?") has well trans- 
lated : — 

Dear happy groves, and you, the dark retreat 
Of silent horror, rest's eternal seat. 

We are sorry we cannot recollect any more. It expresses 
the wish, which so many have felt, to live in retirement, 
and be devoted to the beauties of nature. Another 
passage, more generally known, turns also upon a very 
general feeling of regret — that of seeing spring-time 
reappear, unaccompanied with the joys we have lost. 
Guarini was safer in following his original into these 
sincere corners of the heart, than when he attempted to 
refute him with a boy's copy-book. The passage is very 
beautiful, and no less popular : — 

Primavera, gioventu de 1' anno, 

Bella madre de' fiori, 

D' erbe novelle e di novelli arnori, 

Tu torni ben ; rna teco 

Non tornano i sereni 

E fortunati di de le mie gioje : 

Tu torni ben, tu torni, 

Ma teco altro non torna 

Che del perduto mio caro tesoro 

La rimembranza misera e dolente : 



128 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA, 

Tu quella sei, tu quella, 
Ch' era pur dianzi si vezzosa e bella ; 
Ma non son io gia quel ch'un tempo fui, 
Si caro a gli occhi altrui. 

— Pastor Fido, atto iii. sc. i. 

Spring, thou youthful beauty of the year, 
Mother of flowers, bringer of warbling quires, 
Of all sweet new green things and new desires, 
Thou, Spring, returnest ; but, alas ! with thee 
No more return to me 

The calm and happy days these eyes were used to see. 

Thou, thou returnest, thou, 

But with thee returns now 

Nought else but dread remembrance of the pleasure 

1 took in my lost treasure. 

Thou still, thou still, art the same blithe, sweet thing 

Thou ever wast, Spring ; 

But I, in whose weak orbs these tears arise, 

Am what I was no more, dear to another's eyes. 

The repetitions in this beautiful lament, 
Tu torni ben, tu torni, &c, 

are particularly affecting. Perhaps the tone of them was 
caught from Ariosto : — 

Non son, non sono io quel che paio in viso : 
Quel ch'era Orlando, e morto, ed e sotterra. 

— Furioso, canto xxiii. st. 128. 

No more, no more am I what I appear : 
He that Orlando was, is dead and gone. 



ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL. 129 

It is no critical violence at any time to pass from 
the Italian schools of poetry to those of our own 
country. They have always been closely connected, 
at least on the side of England, for the others knew 
little of their Northern admirers — men in whom 
Ariosto and Tasso would have delighted. Our lan- 
guage, till of late years, was not so widely spread as the 
Italian. 

Our earliest pastoral poet of any name is Spenser ; 
and a great name he is, though he was not a great 
pastoral poet. He was deeply intimate both with Greek 
and Italian pastoral ; but in admiring Theocritus, and 
hoping to rival his natural language, he unwisely 
attempted to engraft the sweet fruit of the south on 
the rudest crab-apple of northern rusticity. Hence, in 
his only pastoral professing to be such, entitled the 
Shepherd's Calendar, he has almost entirely failed. 
There are some touching lines in the story of the Fox 
and Kid, and a beautiful paraphrase of that of Cupid 
and the Fowler, from Bion ; but in truth, with all his 
love of the woods and fields, for which he had a poet's 
passion, and never could be without, Spenser was not 
qualified to excel as a purely pastoral writer. He 
was too learned for it, too full of the writers before 
him, and could not dispense with their chivalry and 
mythology. His words were Greek rather than English ; 

9 



130 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

or if English, they were the English of a former time. 
When Venus and the Graces were not there, he saw 
enchantresses and knights -errant. He always had 
visions, as Milton had, either of Jove or Proserpine, 
or of 

Faery damsels met in forests icicle 
By knights of Logres and of Lyones, 
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore. 

But this elevated him to the high ideal of the 
subject ; and no man could have written so fine a 
pastoral as he, of the classical or romantic sort, had he 
set his luxuriant wits to it, instead of attempting to get 
up an uncouth dance with the " clouted shoon " of 
Hohhinol and Davie. He could have beaten Ben 
Jonson, Fletcher, and all. Under picturesque influ- 
ences, he never failed to add beauty to beauty. In the 
original of the passage we have alluded to, which 
he imitated from Bion, (the story of Cupid and the 
Fowler,) Bion merely makes the young fowler take 
Cupid in the trees for a bird, and endeavour to ensnare 
him ; ending with a pretty admonition, from an old 
master of the craft, not to persevere in his attempt, 
seeing that the bird in question was a very dangerous 
bird, and would come to him soon enough by-and-by of 
his own accord. In Spenser, Cupid has wings coloured 
like a peacock's train ; and after flashing out beautifully 



ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL. 131 

from the bushes to a tree, the little god leaps from 
bough to bough, and playfully catches the stones 
thrown at him in his hand. All the introductory 
details, too, which are full of truth, are Spenser's : — 

At length within the yvie todde 
(There shrowded was the little god) 

I heard a busie bustling ; 
I bent my bolt against the bush, 
Listning if anie thing did rush, 

But then heard no more rustling. 
Tho, peeping close into the thicke, 
Might see the moving of some quiche, 

Whose shape appeared not ; 
But were it faerie, feend, or snake, 
My courage yearn'd it to awake, 

And manfully thereat shotte : 
With that sprang forth a naked swayne, 
With spotted iringes like peacock's trayne, 

And, laughing, lope to a tree; 
His gulden quiver at his back ; 
And silver bowe, which was but slacke, 

Which lightly he bent at me: 
That seeing, I leveld againe, 
And shot at him with might and mayDe, 

As thick as it had hayled : 
So long I shott, that all was spent ; 
The pumie- stones I hastily hent, 

And threw ; but nought avayled : 
He was so nimble and so wight, 
From bough to bough he leppecl light, 

And oft the pumies latched. 

— Shepherd's Calendar^ March, v. 67~ 



132 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Latched, is caught; and pinnies, and pumie-stones, 
are pumice-stones, a very light mineral. The fowler is 
considerate, and would not break the bird's head. This 
passage is one of the least obsolete in its style of all the 
Shepherd's Calendar; yet what a pity to see it deformed 
with words requiring explanation, such as latched for 
caught, tho for then, lope for leaped, &c. With the like 
needless perversity, forgetful of his elevated calling, 
Spenser, in his pastoral character, delights to designate 
himself as " Colin Clout," as though he were nothing 
better than a patch in the very heels of clodhopping. 
And yet, under this name, he sees the Nymphs and 
Graces dancing round his shepherdess upon Mount 
Acidale ! The passage, otherwise, is one of his most 
elegant pieces of invention ; and with the Grecian 
topography, may be said to exhibit the very highest 
region and crown of the pastoral side of Parnassus. 
Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy (for thus does he 
mix up the classical and romantic grounds ; but no 
matter for that, since they are both in the regions of 
imagination), hears a noise of music and dancing as he 
is approaching the top of Mount Acidale. Upon looking 
amongst the trees, when he reaches it, he sees a shep- 
herd piping to his love, in the midst of 

An hundred naked maidens, lily-white, 

All ranged in a ring, and dancing in delight. 



ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL. 138 

But we must not lose the description of the place 
itself : — 

It was an hill, plaiste in an open plaine, 
That round about is border'd with a wood 
Of matchless hight, that seem'd th' earth to disdaine, 
In which all trees of honour stately stood, 
And did all winter as in summer bud, 
Spredding pavillions for the birds to bowre, 
Which in their lower braunches sang aloud ; 
And in their tops the soring hawk did towre, 
Sitting like king offoules in majesty and powre : 

And at the foote thereof a gentle flud 
His silver waves did softly tumble down, 
Unmar'd with ragged mosse or filthy mud ; 
Ne mote wild beastes, ne mote the ruder clowne, 
Thereto approach ; ne filth mote therein drowne : 
But Nymphs and Faeries by the bancks did sit 
In the wood's shade, which did the waters crowne, 
Keeping all noysome things away from it, 
And to the water's fall tuning their accents fit. 

And on the top thereof a spacious plaine 
Did spred itselfe, to serve to all delight, 
Either to daunce, when they to daunce would faine, 
Or else to course about their bases light ; 
Ne ought there wanted, which for pleasure might 
Desired be, or thence to banish bale ; 
So pleasantly the hill with equall hight 
Did seem to overlooke the lowly vale ; 
Therefore it rightly cleeped was Mount Acidale.* 

* Perhaps from a Greek root, expressing carelessness or quiet. 



134 A JAR OF HONEY FKOM MOUNT HYBLA, 

They say that Venus, when she did dispose 
Herselfe to pleasaunce, used to resort 
Unto this place, and therein to repose 
And rest herself, as in a gladsome port ; 
Or with the Graces, there to play and sport ; 
That even her own Cytheron, though in it 
She used most to keep her royall court, 
And in her soveraine majesty to sit, 
She, in regard thereof, refusde and thought unfit. 

Unto this place when as the elfin knight 
Approacht, him seemed that the merry sound 
Of a shrill pipe he playing heard on hight, 
And many feete fast thumping th' hollow ground, 
That through the woods their echo did rehound. 
He hither drew, to weete what, mote it he : 
There he a troupe of ladies dauncing found 
Full merrily, and making gladfull glee, 
And in the midst a shepherd piping he did see. 

He durst not enter into th' open greene, 
For dread of them unawares to be descryde, 
For breaking of their daunce, if he were seene ; 
But in the covert of the wood did byde, 
Beholding all, yet of them unespyde : 
There he did see, that pleased much his sight, 
That even he himself his eyes envyde, 
An hundred naked maidens, lilly white, 
All raunged in a ring and dauncing in delight. 

In the middle of this orb of fair creatures, the 
beauty of which there is nothing of the sort to equal, 
(unless it be those circles of lily-white stamens which, 
with such exquisite mystery, adorn the commonest 



ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL. 135 

flower-cups — so profuse of her poetry is Nature !), Sir 
Calidore sees " three other ladies," both dancing and 
singing — to wit, the Graces ; and in the midst of 
" those same three" was yet another lady, or rather 
"damsel" (for she was of rustic origin), crowned with 
a garland of roses, and so beautiful, that she was the 
very gem of the ring, and "graced" the Graces them- 
selves. The hundred nymphs, as they danced, threw 
flowers upon her ; the Graces endowed her with the 
gifts which she reflected upon them, enhanced ; and a 
shepherd sat piping to them all. 

Never, surely, was such deification of a " country 
lass; " and well might the poet hail his spectacle in a 
rapture of self-complacency, and encourage his pipe to 
play on : — 

Pype, jolly shepheard ! pype thou now apace 
Unto thy love, that made thee low to lout. 

(He has raised her from the condition to which he 
stooped to obtain her.) 

Thy love is present there with thee in place — 

(That is, in the midst of his poetry and his 
fame.) 

Thy love is there advaunst to be another Grace, 

But a mishap is on the heels of this vision, con- 



136 A JAK OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

nected with our author's professed attempts at pastoral ; 
for so we have little doubt it is, though the commen- 
tators have given it another meaning. Sir Calidore, 
envying his eyes a sight which so "enriched" them, 
left the covert through which he looked, and went 
towards it : — 

Bat soone as he appeared to their view, 
They vanisht all away, out of his sight, 
And cleane were gone, which way he never knew, 
All save the shepherd ; who, for fell despight 
Of that displeasure, broke his bag-pipe quight, 
And made great mone for that unhappy turne ; 
But Calidore, though no less sorry wight 
For that mishap, yet seeing him to mourne, 
Drew neare, that he the truth of all by him might learne. 

Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy, is understood to 
be Sir Philip Sidney, who, in his Defence of Poesy, had 
objected to the style of the Shepherd's Calendar ; and 
as his word was taken for law in matters of taste, and the 
criticism was probably fatal to the poet's continuance in 
that style (for at all events he dropped it), we have 
scarcely a doubt that Spenser alludes to the fact of his 
giving up pastoral writing in consequence. He breaks 
his pipe ; not, it seems (like most authors, when they 
give way to critics), without much secret vexation — nay, 
a " fell despight," as he calls it ; candidly, if not a little 
maliciously, owning the whole extent of his feelings on 



ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTOEAL. 137 

the subject to his illustrious critic, who had since 
become his friend. It was a disadvantage which his 
pride could not feel itself easy with, till it had set 
it to rights. The following is the passage in Sidney's 



The Shepherd's Kalander hath much poetry in his 
eclogues, indeed worthy the reading, if I be not deceived. 
That same framing of his style to an old rustic language, I 
dare not allow ; since neither Theocritus in Greek, Yirgil in 
Latin, nor Sannazarro in Italian, did affect it. 

He means that Theocritus and the others wrote in 
the language of their times, and that to be obsolete 
is not to be natural. Spenser, it is to be observed, 
expressly designates himself in this episode as Colin 
Clout, which is the title he assumed as the author of 
the Shepherd's Calendar; a "country lassie" is his 
goddess in that work ; and it seems far more likely that 
under this identity of appellation he should complain, 
in one poem, of the discouragement given to another, 
than simply shadow forth (as the commentators think) 
the circumstance of Sir Philip Sidney's having drawn 
him from the country to the court. In what consisted 
the abrupt intervention of a proceeding like that ? 
What particular vision did it dissipate ? Or how could 
he pretend any right of soreness in his tone of complaint 
about it ? And he is very sore indeed at the knight's 



138 A JAB OP HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

interruption, notwithstanding his courtesy. Tell me, 
says Calidore — 

Tell ine what mote these dainty damsels be, 
Which here with thee do make their pleasant playes : 
Eight happy thou, that mayst them freely see ; 
But why, when I them saw, fled they away from me ? 

Not I so happy, answered then that swaine, 
As thou unhajrpy, which them thence did chase, 
Whom by no meanes thou canst recall againe. 

He could not look back with comfort upon having been 
forced to give up his pastoral visions. 

But to return to our subject. The all-including 
genius of Shakspeare has given the finest intimations 
of pastoral writing in some of the masques introduced 
in his plays, and in his plays themselves ; if indeed 
As You Like It might not equally as well be called a 
pastoral play as a comedy; though, to be sure, the 
duke and his followers do not willingly take to the 
woods, with the exception of the " sad shepherd" 
Jacques ; and this is a great drawback on the pleasures 
of the occasion, which ought to breathe as freely as the 
air and the wild roses. Eosalind, however, is a very bud 
of the pastoral ideal, peeping out of her forest jerkin. 
Again, in the Winter's Tale, where the good housewife 
is recorded, who has "her face o' fire" with attending 
to the guests, and " my sister," who has the purchase 



ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL. 139 

of the eatables, "lays it on" (as her brother the clown 
says) in the article of rice, there is the truest pastoral 
of both kinds, the ideal and the homely : — ■ 

Shepherd. Fie, daughter ! When my old wife liv'd, upon 
This day she was both pantler, butler, cook, — 
Both dame and servant ; welcomed all, serv'd all ; 
Would sing her song, and dance her turn ; now here, 
At upper end 6* the table, now i 1 the middle ; 
On his shoulder, and his; her face o' fire 
With labour ; and the thing she took to quench it, 
She would to each one sip. 

What a poet, and what a painter ! Now a Eaphael, 
or Michael Angelo; now a Jan Steen or a Teniers. 
Here also is Autolycus, the most exquisite of impudent 
vagabonds, better even than the Brass of Sir John 
Yanbrugh ; selling his love ballads, so without inde- 
cency, "which is strange," and another ballad of a 
singing Fish, with " five justices' hands to it," to vouch 
for its veracity. But, above all, here is Perdita : — 

The prettiest low-born lass that ever 
Ban on the green sward. 

No shepherdess, but Flora, 
Peering in April's front. 

Perdita, also, though supposed to be a shepherdess born, 
is a Sicilian princess, and makes our blue jar glisten 
again in the midst of its native sun and flowers. 



140 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Proserpina ! 
For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let'st fall 
From Dis's waggon ! — 

(" Waggon," be it observed, was as much a word of 
respect in those days as " chariot " is now.) 

Daffodils 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty ; violets, dim, 
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, 
Or Cytherea's breath ; 

bold oxlips, and 
The crown -imperial ; lilies of all kinds, 
The flower-de-luce being one. 0, these I lack 
To make you garlands of; and, my sweet friend, 

[Turning to her lover. 
To strew him o'er and o'er. 

Flokizel. What ! like a corse ? 

Peedita. No : like a bank, for love to He and play on. 
Not like a corse ; or if, — not to be buried, 
But quick, and in mine arms. 

Shelley has called a woman "one of Shakspeare's 
women," implying by that designation all that can be 
suggested of grace and sweetness. They were " very 
subtle," as Mr. Wordsworth said of the French ladies. 
Not that they were French ladies, or English either ; 
but Nature's and refinement's best possible gentle- 
women all over the world. Tullia d'Aragona, the Italian 
poetess, who made all her suitors love one another 
instead of quarrel, must have been a Shakspeare woman. 



ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTOKAL. 141 

Gaspara Stampa was another ; and we should take the 
authoress of Auld Robin Gray for one. 

Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother, 

and Lucy, Countess of Bedford, must have been such. 
So was Mrs. Brooke, who wrote Emily Montague ; and 
probably Madame Biccoboni ; and certainly my Lady 
Winchelsea, who worshipped friendship, and green 
retreats, and her husband; — terrible people all, to 
look upon, if the very sweetness of their virtue did not 
enable us to bear it. 

Ben Jonson left an unfinished dramatic pastoral, 
entitled the Sad Shepherd. It is a story of Kobin 
Hood, in connection with a shepherd who has gone 
melancholy mad for the supposed death of his mistress 
— a lucky character for the exalted wilfulness of the 
author's style. The lover opens the play with the 
following elegant extravagance : — 

^Eglamour. Here she was wont to go ! and here ! and 
here! 
Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow : 
The world may find the spring by following her. 

This is a truly lover-like fancy; and the various, im- 
pulsive, and flowery versification is perfect. Ben Jonson 
can never leave out his learning. The lost mistress 
must be compared, in the impossible lightness of her 



142 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

step, with Virgil's Camilla, who ran over the tops of 

corn : — 

For other print her airy steps ne'er left ; 
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass, 
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk. 

What unsubstantial womanhood ! How different from 
the bride of Bedreddin Hassan ! 

" Up, up in haste ! " the young man cries : 
Ah ! slender waist ! she cannot rise 
For heavy hips, that say, " Sit still," 
And make her linger 'gainst her will. 

— Tokkens's Arabian Nights. 

The best passage in the Sad Shepherd is a description 
of a witch and her habits — a subject which every way 
suited the arbitrary and sullen side of the poet's notions 
of power. It also enabled him to show his reading, as 
he takes care to let us know 7 , by means of one of the 
bystanders : — 

Alken. Know ye the witch's dell ? 

Scathlock. No more than I do know the ways of hell. 

Alken. Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell, 
Down in a pit, o'ergrown with brakes and briers, 
Close by the ruins of a shaken abbey, 
Torn with an earthquake down unto the ground, 
'Mongst graves and grots, near an old charnel-house, 
Where you shall find her sitting in her form, 
As fearful and melancholic as that 
She is about with caterpillars' kells 
And knotty cobwebs, rounded in with spells. 



ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTOKAL. 143 

Thence she steals forth to revel in the fogs 

And rotten mists upon the fens and bogs, 

Down to the drowned lands of Lincolnshire ; 

To make ewes cast their lambs, swine eat their farrow, 

The housewife's tun not work, nor the milk churn ! 

Writhe children's wrists, and suck their breath in sleep, 

Get vials of their blood ; and where the sea 

Casts up its slimy ooze, search for a weed 

To open locks with, and to rivet charms, 

Planted about her in the wicked feat 

Of all her mischiefs, which are manifold. 

John. I wonder such a story could be told 
Of her dire deeds. 

Geoege. I thought a witch's banks 

Had enclosed nothing but the merry pranks 
Of some old woman. 

Scaelet. Yes, her malice more. 

Scathlock. As it would quickly appear had we the store 
Of his collects. 

Geoege. Ay, this good learned man 
Can speak her rightly. 

Scaelet. He knows her shifts and haunts. 

Alken. And all her wiles and turns. The venom'd plants 
Wherewith she kills ; where the sad mandrake grows, 
Whose groans are dreadful ; the dead-numbing nightshade, 
The stupifying hemlock, adder's tongue, 
And martagan ; the shrieks of luckless owls 
We hear, and croaking night-crows in the air ; 
Green-bellied snakes, blue fire- drakes in the sky, 
And giddy flitter-mice with leather wings, 
And scaly beetles with their habergeons, 
That make a humming murmur as they fly. 
There, in the stocks of trees, white faies do dwell, 
And span-long elves that dance about a pool 
With each a little changeling in their arms / 



144 A JAB OF HONEY FKOM MOUNT HYBLA. 

And airy spirits play with falling stars, 
And mount the sphere of fire to kiss the moon, 
"While she sits reading (by the glow-worm's light, 
Or rotten wood, o'er which the worm hath crept) 
The baneful schedule of her nocent charms. 

The idea of " span-long elves," who dance about a pool, 
carrying each a stolen infant, that must be bigger than 
themselves, is a very capital and fantastic horror. 

Old burly and strong-sensation-loving Ben (as his 
friend Chapman, or Mr. Bentham, might have called 
him) could show, however, a great deal of delicacy when 
he had a mind to it. He could turn his bluster into a 
zephyr that inspired the young genius of Milton. Some 
of his court masques are pastoral ; and the following is 
the style in which he receives the king and queen. 
Maia (the goddess of May) says — 

If all the pleasures were distill'd 
Of every flower in every field — 

(This kind of return of words was not common then, as 
he has since made it) 

And all that Hybla's hives do yield, 
Were into one broad mazer fill'd ; 
If thereto added all the gums 
And spice that from Panchaia comes, 
The odours that Hydaspes lends, 
Or Phoenix proves before she ends ; 
If all the air my Flora drew, 
Or spirit that Zephyr ever blew, 



ITALIAN AND ENGLISH PASTORAL. 145 

Were put therein ; and all the clew 
That ever rosy morning knew ; 
Yet all, diffused upon this bower, 
To make one sweet detaining hour, 
Were much too little for the grace 
And honour you vouchsafe the place. 

In the masque of Oberon, Silenus bids his Satyrs 
rouse up a couple of sleeping Sylvans, who ought to 
have been keeping watch ; " at which," says the poet's 
direction, "the Satyrs fell suddenly into this catch" — 
Musicians know it well: — 

Buz, quoth the blue fly ; 

Hum, quoth the bee ; 
Buz and hum they cry, 

And so do we. 
In his ear, in his nose, 

Thus, do you see! [They tickle them. 

He eat the dormouse, 

Else it was he. 

It is impossible that anything could better express 
than this, either the wild and practical joking of the 
Satyrs, or the action of the thing described, or the 
quaintness and fitness of the images, or the melody and 
even the harmony, the intercourse, of the musical words, 
one with another. None but a boon companion with a 
very musical ear could have written it. It was not for 
nothing that Ben lived in the time of the fine old English 
composers, Bull and Ford ; or partook his canary with 

10 



146 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

his "lov'd Alphonso," as he calls him, — the Signor 
Ferrabosco. 

We have not yet done with this delightful portion 
of our subject. Fletcher and Milton await us still ; 
together with the pastoral poet, William Browne ; and 
a few other poets, who, though they wrote no pastorals, 
were pastoral men. 




( 147 



CHAPTER VIII. 

ENGLISH PASTOML-(Continued) ■ AND SCOTCH PASTORAL. 

Fletcher's " faithful shepherdess." — probable reason 

of its non-success. " comus " and " lycidas." 

dr. Johnson's " world." — burns and allan ramsay. 



.&-« 



*X 



«%> 



Uh 



HE title and story of the 
Sad Shepherd of Ben 
Jonson, in combination 
with those of the Faith- 
ful Shepherd {Pastor 
Fido) of Guarini, appear to 
have suggested to Fletcher 
his Faithful Shep- 
herdess. This is undoubtedly the chief pastoral play 
in our language, though, with all its beauties, we can 



1 






148 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

hardly think it ought to have been such, considering 
what Shakspeare and Spenser have shown that they 
could have done in this Arcadian region. The illustrious 
author, exquisite poet as he was, and son of a bishop to 
boot, had the misfortune, with his friend Beaumont, to 
be what is called a " man upon town; " which polluted 
his sense of enjoyment and rendered him but imper- 
fectly in earnest, even when he most wished to be so. 
Hence his subserviency to the taste of those painful 
gentlemen called men of pleasure, and his piecing out 
his better sentiments with exaggeration. Hence the 
revolting character, in this play, of a " Wanton 
Shepherdess," which is an offence to the very 
voluptuousness it secretly intended to interest ; and 
hence the opposite offence of the character of the 
" Faithful Shepherdess " herself, who is ostentatiously 
made such a paragon of chastity, and values herself so 
excessively on the self-denial, that the virtue itself is 
compromised, and you can see that the author had very 
little faith in it. And we have little doubt that this was 
the cause why the play was damned (for such is the 
startling fact), and not the ignorance of the audience, to 
which Beaumont and Ben Jonson indignantly attributed 
it. The audience could not reconcile such painful, 
and, as it must have appeared to them, such hypocritical 
contradictions : and very distressing to the author must 



ENGLISH AND SCOTCH PASTOKAL. 149 

it have been to find, that he had himself contributed to 
create that sceptical tone of mind in the public 
respecting both himself and the female sex, which 
refused to take him at his word when he was for 
putting on a graver face, and claiming their ultra- 
belief in all that he chose to assume. The " Faithful 
Shepherdess " is a young widow, who is always talking 
of devoting herself to her husband's memory ; and her 
lover Thenot is so passionately enamoured of her, that 
he says if she were to give up the devotion, his passion 
would be lost. He entreats her at once to " hear him " 
and to " deny ! " This child's play is what the audience 
could not tolerate. It was a pity ; for there are passages 
in the Faithful Shepherdess as lovely as poet could 
write. We are never tired of hearing — 

How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, 
First saw the boy Endymion, from, whose eyes 
She took eternal fire that never dies ; 
How she conveyed him softly in a sleep, 
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep 
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night, 
Gilding the mountain with her brother s light, 
To kiss her sweetest. 

So of the dessert gathered by the Satyr for the nymph 
Syrinx : — 

Here be grapes, whose lusty blood 
Is the learned poet's good ; 



150 A JAE OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Sweeter yet did never crown 

The head of Bacchus ; nuts more brown 

Than the squirrel's teeth that crack them ; 

Deign, oh, fairest fair, to take them. 

For these black-eyed Driope 

Hath oftentimes commanded me 

With my clasped hiee to climb : 

See how well the lusty time 

Hath decked their rising cheeks in red, 

Such as on your lips is spread. 

Here be berries for a queen, 

Some be red, some be green ; 

These are of that luscious meat, 

The great god Pan himself doth eat ; 

All these, and what the woods can yield, 

The hanging mountain or the field, 

I freely offer, and ere long 

Will bring you more, more sweet and strong ; 

Till then humbly leave I take, 

Lest the great Pan do awake, 

That sleeping lies in a deep glade 

Under a broad beech's shade. 

I must go, I must run, 

Swifter than the fiery sun. 

See also the love made by the river-god at the end of 
the third Act, which, we have not room to quote ; and 
the Satyr's account of dawn, which opens with the four 
most exquisite lines perhaps in the whole play : — 

See, the day begins to break, 
And- the light shoots like a streak 
Of subtle fire. — The wind blows cold, 
While the morning doth unfold. 



ENGLISH AND SCOTCH PASTOEAL. 151 

Who has not felt this mingled charmingness and 
chilliness (we do n6t use the words for the sake of the 
alliteration) at the first opening of the morning ! Yet 
none but the finest poets venture upon thus combining 
pleasure with something that might be thought a draw- 
back. But it is truth ; and it is truth in which the 
beauty surmounts the pain ; and therefore they give it. 
And how simple and straightforward is every word ! 
There are no artificial tricks of composition here. The 
words are not suggested to the truth by the author, but 
to the author by the truth. We feel the wind blowing 
as simply as it does in nature ; so that if the reader be 
artificially trained, and does not bring a feeling for truth 
with him analogous to that of the poet, the very sim- 
plicity is in danger of losing him the perception of the 
beauty. And yet there is art as well as nature in the 
verses; for art in the poet must perfect what nature 
does by her own art. Observe, for instance, the 
sudden and strong emphasis on the word s7ioots, 
and the variety of tone and modulation in the 
whole passage, with the judicious exceptions of the 
two o's in the " wind blows cold," which have the 
solemn continuous sound of what it describes : 
also, the corresponding ones in "doth unfold," which 
maintain the like continuity of the growing day- 
light. And exquisite, surely, is the dilatory and 



152 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

golden sound of the word " morning " between 
them : 

The wind blows cold, 
While the mor-ning doth unfold. 

Milton's Comas, though not equal throughout to the 
Faithful Shepherdess in descriptive judgment (for it 
talks of " groves of myrrh and cinnamon " on the banks 
of a British river), is altogether a finer poem, and a far 
better recommendation of chastity. Indeed, it might 
rather have been called Castitas than Comus ; for 
Comas has little justice done to his powers of temp- 
tation. Perhaps Fletcher's failure in recommending 
chastity suggested the hope of surpassing him to 
Milton. His emulation of particular passages in the 
Faithful Shepherdess, particularly on that subject, has 
been noticed by the commentators. But Comus is a 
mask, not a pastoral. It can hardly even be called a 
pastoral mask ; for the shepherd is the least person in 
it ; and though the Italians identify the pastoral with 
the sylvan drama, or fable transacted in the woods, 
which are the scene of action in Comus, the reader feels 
that the woods have really almost as little to do with it 
as the fields ; — that the moral, in fact, is all in all ; 
which is the reason why nobody takes very heartily to 
the subject, especially as Milton acts in morals like 
a kind of solemn partisan, and does not run, like 



ENGLISH AND SCOTCH PASTOKAL, 158 

Shakspeare, the whole circle of humanity in arguing 
his question. 

Milton's only real pastoral (with the exception of the 
country part of the Allegro) is his allegorical monody 
on the death of his friend King, — the Lycidas; and a 
beautiful one it is, though Dr. Johnson, in his one- 
sided misapplication of a right principle, laughed at 
grief which departs from the ordinary phases of life, and 
which talks of nymphs and river-gods, and " satyrs with 
cloven heel." " Grief," he said, " does not talk of such 
things ; " to which Warton said very truly, " But Poetry 
does ; " and he might have added (still more literally 
than he puts it), that Grief does so too, when it is the 
grief of one young poet mourning for another. Johnson 
says that Milton and his friend were not " nursed on 
the same hill," as represented in Lycidas ; and that 
they did not " feed the same flock," &c. But they 
were, and they did. They were nursed on the same 
hill of Arcady, and fed the same flock of the ideal 
pastoral life ; and very grievous it was for them to be 
torn asunder, to be deprived by death of their mutual 
delight in Theocritus, and Virgil, and Spenser, the 
beloved haunts of their minds, things which it has 
agonized friends and poets to be torn away from, both 
before and since the time of Milton, however little they 
may have been cared for by dear, good, dictatorial, 



154 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

purblind, un-ideal Dr. Johnson, whose world, though it 
was a wit's and a sage's world too, was not the 
universal and still sager world of the poet, but made 
up (exclusively) of the Strand, hypochondria, charity, 
bigotry, wit, argument, and a good dinner ; — a pretty 
region, but not the green as well as smoky world of 
Nature and Shakspeare. 

Fault has been found also with the intermixture of 
theology in Lycidas ; but it is to be defended on the 
same ground — namely, that Milton's young friend 
studied theology with him as well as poetry ; and 
hence the propriety of introducing the pilot of the 
Galilean lake. 

One ought to be grateful for it, if only for its giving 
the poet occasion to dismiss the solemn vision, and 
encourage, in those lovely verses, the beautiful fictions 
of Paganism and Theocritus to come back : — 

Return, Alpheus ; the dread voice is past 
That shrunk thy streams ; return, Sicilian Muse, 
And call -the vales, and bid them hither cast 
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues. 
Ye valleys low, ivhere the mild ivhisjjers use 
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, 
On whose fresh lap the swart- star sparely looks, 
Throw hither all your quaint-enamell'd eyes 
That on the green turf suck the honied showers, 
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. 
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, 



ENGLISH AND SCOTCH PASTOEAL. 155 

The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, 
The white pink, and the pansy, freak 1 d with jet, 
The glowing violet. 

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, 
With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head, 
And every flower that sad embroidery wears ; 
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, 
And daffodillies Jill their cups with tears, 
To strew the laureat herse where Lycid lies. 
***** 

Thus sang the swain to the oaks and rills, 
While the still morn went out with sandals grey. 

These are the chief pastoral writers in the language 
of the ideal class. Pope professed to be a classical 
pastoral writer, and split, accordingly, on the hard rock 
of Latin imitation. Even Gay's burlesque pastoral was 
better, for it went to the real fields for its imagery ; and 
Phillips would have surpassed both, if he had not been 
affected. His verses from Copenhagen, describing a 
northern winter, are fresh from Nature. 

Allan Kamsay is the prince of the homely pastoral 
drama. Burns wrote in this class of poetry at no such 
length as Kamsay ; but he was pastoral poetry itself, in 
the shape of an actual, glorious peasant, vigorous as if 
Homer had written him, and tender as generous 
strength, or as memories of the grave. Ramsay and he 
have helped Scotland for ever to take pride in its 
heather, and its braes, and its bonny rivers, and be 



156 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBL1. 

ashamed of no beauty or honest truth, in high estate or 
in low ; — an incalculable blessing. Bamsay, to be sure, 
with all his genius, and though he wrote an entire and 
excellent dramatic pastoral, in five legitimate acts, is 
but a small part of Burns: — is but a field in a corner 
compared with the whole Scots pastoral region. He has 
none of Burns's pathos ; none of his grandeur ; none of 
his burning energy ; none of his craving after universal 
good. How universal is Burns ! What mirth in his 
cups ! What softness in his tears ! What sympathy in 
his very satire ! What manhood in everything ! If 
Theocritus, the inventor of a loving and affecting Poly- 
phemus, could have foreseen the verses on the Mouse 
and the Daisy turned up with plough, the Tarn o' 
Shanter, O Willie brew'd a peck o' maut, Ye banks 
and braes o' bonnie Doon, &c, (not to mention a 
hundred others, which have less to do with our subject,) 
tears of admiration would have rushed into his eyes. 

Nevertheless Allan Bamsay is not only entitled to 
the designation we have given him, but in some respects 
is the best pastoral writer in the world. There are, in 
truth, two sorts of genuine pastoral — the high ideal of 
Fletcher and Milton, which is justly to be considered 
he more poetical, — and the homely ideal, as set forth 
by Allan Kamsay and some of the Idyls of Theo- 
critus, and which gives us such feelings of nature 



ENGLISH AND SCOTCH PAST0KAL, 157 

and passion as poetical rustics not only can, but have 
entertained, and eloquently described. And we think 
the Gentle Shepherd, " in some respects," the best 
pastoral that ever was written, not because it has 
anything, in a poetical point of view, to compare with 
Fletcher and Milton, but because there is, upon the 
whole, more faith and more love in it, and because the 
kind of idealized truth which it undertakes to represent, 
is delivered in a more corresponding and satisfactory 
form than in any other entire pastoral drama. In fact, 
the Gentle Shepherd has no alloy whatsoever to its 
pretensions, such as they are — no failure in plot, 
language, or character — nothing answering to the cold- 
ness and irrelevances of Comus, nor to the offensive 
and untrue violations of decorum in the " Wanton 
Shepherdess " of Fletcher's pastoral, and the pedantic 
and ostentatious chastity of his Faithful one. It is a 
pure, healthy, natural, and (of its kind) perfect plant, 
sprung out of an unluxuriant but not ungenial soil ; not 
hung with the beauty and fragrance of the productions of 
the higher regions of Parnassus ; not waited upon by 
spirits and enchanted music ; a dog-rose, if you will ; 
say rather, a rose in a cottage-garden, dabbled with the 
morning dew, and plucked by an honest lover to give to 
his mistress. 

Allan Ramsay's poem is not only a probable and 



158 A JAR OP HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

pleasing story, containing charming pictures, much 
knowledge of life, and a good deal of quiet humour, but 
in some respects it may be called classical, if by 
classical is meant ease, precision, and unsuperfluousness 
of style. Kamsay's diction is singularly straightforward, 
seldom needing the assistance of inversions ; and he 
rarely says anything for the purpose of " filling up ; " — 
two freedoms from defect the reverse of vulgar and 
commonplace ; nay, the reverse of a great deal of what 
pretends to be fine writing, and is received as such. We 
confess we never tire of dipping into it, " on and off," 
any more than into Fletcher, or Milton, or into 
Theocritus himself, who, for the union of something 
higher with true pastoral, is unrivalled in short pieces. 
The Gentle Shepherd is not a forest, nor a mountain- 
side, nor Arcady ; but it is a field full of daisies, with a 
brook in it, and a cottage "at the sunny end;" and 
this we take to be no mean thing, either in the real or 
the ideal world. Our Jar of Honey may well lie for a 
few moments among its heather, albeit filled from 
Hybla. There are bees, "look you," in Habbie's How. 
Theocritus and Allan shake hands over a shepherd's 
pipe. Take the beginning of Scene ii. Act i., both for 
description and dialogue: — 

A flowrie howm between twa verdant braes, 
Where lassies use to wash and spread their claes ; 



ENGLISH AND SCOTCH PASTORAL. 159 

A trottin' birnie wimpliri 1 through the ground, 
Its channel pebbles shining smooth and round. 
Here view twa barefoot beauties, clean and clear, 
First please your eye, next gratify your ear, 
While Jenny ivhat she wishes discommends, 
And Meg, with better sense, true love defends. 

Jenny. Come, Meg, lets fa' to work upon this green, 
This shining day will bleach our linen clean : 
The waters clear, the lift unclouded blue, 
Will make them like a lily wet wi' dew. 

Peggy. Gae far'er up the burn to Habbie's How, 
Where a' the sweets o' spring and simmer grow ; 
There 'tween twa birks, out ower a little lin, 
The water fa's, and maks a singin' din ; 
A pool breast-deep, beneath as clear as glass, 
Kisses, ivi' easy whirls, the bordering grass. 
We'll end our washing while the morning's cool, 
And when the day grows het, we'll to the pool, 
There wash oursells ; 't is healthfu' now in May, 
And sweetly cauler on sae warm a day. 

This is an out-door picture. Here is an indoor one 
quite as good — nay, better: — 

While Peggy laces up her bosom fair, 
With a blue snood Jenny binds up her hair ; 
Glaud by his morning ingle takes a beek ; 
The rising sun shines motty through the reek ; 
A pipe his mouth, the lasses please his een, 
And now and then his joke maun intervene. 

We would quote, if we could — only it might not look 
so proper, when isolated — the whole song at the close of 



160 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Act the Second. The first line of it alone is worth all 
Pope's pastorals put together, and (we were going to 
add) half of those of Yirgil ; but we reverence too much 
the great follower of the Greeks, and true' lover of the 
country. There is more sentiment, and equal nature, in 
the song at the end of Act the Fourth. Peggy is taking 
leave of her lover, who is going abroad : — 

At setting day and rising morn, 

Wi' saul that still shall love thee, 
I'll ask o' Heaven thy safe return, 

Wi' a' that can improve thee. 
I'll visit aft the birkin bush, 

Where first thou kindly tauld me 
Sweet tales of love, and hid my blush, 

Whilst round thou didst in/aid me. 

To a' our haunts I will repair, 

To greenwood, shaw, or fountain ; 
Or where the summer day I'd share 

Wi' thee upon yon mountain. 
There will I tell the trees and flowers 

Frae thoughts unfeign'd and tender, 
By vows you're mine, by love is yours 

A heart that cannot wander. 

The charming and (so to speak) natural flattery of 
the loving delicacy of this distinction — 

By vows you're mine, by love is yours, 

was never surpassed by a passion the most refined. It 
reminds us of a like passage in the anonymous words 



ENGLISH AND SCOTCH PASTORAL. 161 

(Shakspeare might have written them) of the fine old 
English madrigal by Ford, "Since first I saw your face." 
Perhaps Ford himself wrote them ; for the author of 
that music had sentiment enough in him for anything. 
The passage we allude to is — 

What, I that loved, and you that liked, 
Shall we begin to wrangle ? 

The highest refinement of the heart, though too rare in 
most classes, is luckily to be found in all ; and hence it 
is, that certain meetings of extremes in lovers of different 
ranks in life are not always to be attributed either to a 
failure of taste on the one side, or unsuitable pretensions 
on the other. Scottish dukes have been known to meet 
with real Gentle- Shepherd heroines ; and everybody 
knows the story of a lowly Countess of Exeter, who was 
too sensitive to survive the disclosure of the rank to 
which her lover had raised her. 




11 



162 



A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 



CHAPTER IX. 

ENGLISH PASTOEAL-CConcluded.) 

PASTOEALS OF WILLIAM BKOWNE. PASTOEAL MEN I CERVANTES 

BOCCACCIO CHAUCER COWLEY THOMSON SHENSTONE , 

ETC. 




ONLY undramatic pastorals 
in the language worth men- 
tion are those of Browne, a 
young poet, who wrote in 
the beginning of the reign of 
James the First. He won 
the praises of Drayton and Ben Jonson, and may 
remind the reader of some of the earlier poems of Keats. 
He was a real poet, with a great love of external nature, 



ENGLISH PASTORAL. 163 

and much delicacy and generosity of sentiment; and 
had his judgment been matured, would now have been 
as much admired by the many as he is regarded by the 
few. His verses are of such unequal merit, that it is 
difficult to select any long passage, or scarcely, indeed, 
any short one, that does not contain matter unworthy 
of him ; yet in all may be discerned promise, in many 
sweetness and beauty, in some grandeur ; and there is 
nobody who loves poets of the Spenser school, but will 
have a considerable bit of lurking affection, in the green 
places of his heart, for William Browne, and lament 
that he did not live to become famous. Much of his 
Britannia's Pastorals, as he called them, was written 
before he was twenty. They were collected into a body 
of English verse, for the first time, by Anderson ; but 
Davies published an edition in three volumes duodecimo ; 
they have been lately reprinted in two ; and the lover of 
poetry and field-walks, who is not always in a mood for 
higher stimulants, and who can recognize beauty in a 
hedge-row elm as well as a forest, may reckon himself 
lucky in being able to put one of them in his pocket. 
The pastorals consist of a story with a number of 
episodes, none of which, or story either, can we ever 
remember ; so we will say nothing more about them. 
The names of the persons hum in our ears, and we 
have some conception of two or three of the incidents ; 



164 A JAE OF HONEY FBOM MOUNT HYBLA. 

but the scenes in which they take place, the landscapes, 

the pastoral images, the idealized country manners, 

these are what we are thinking of while the story is 

going on ; just as a man should be hearing some local 

history while going over meadows and stiles, and 

glancing all the while about him instead of paying it 

attention. We shall, therefore, devote this article to 

passages marked with our pen ; as the same man might 

go over the ground afterwards in other company, and 

say, " There is the church I spoke of, in the trees " — 

"Yonder is the passage I mentioned, into the wood" 

■ — " Here the ivy full of the singing-birds." We may, 

perhaps, overrate Browne, out of affection for the 

things he likes to speak of; but sometimes his powers 

are not to be mistaken. He calls Cephalus, whom 

Aurora loved, him 

Whose name was worn 
Within the bosom of the blushing morn. 

Music is 

The soul of art, best loved when love is by. 

Kaleigh, spoken of under the character of a shepherd, 

is a swain 

Whom all the Oraoes kissed ; 

and Pan, a god that 

With gentle nymphs in forests high 
Kissed out the sweet time of his infancy. 

That is very beautiful. Warton, in his History of 



ENGLISH PASTORAL. 165 

Poetry, has expressed his admiration of a " charm " in 
Browne's Inner Temple Masque, in which, down by the 
banks of Lethe, dewdrops are said to be for ever hanging 

On the limber grass, 
Poppy and mandragoras ; 

and Lethe is described as flowing 

"Without coil, 
Softly, like a stream of oil. 

The fourth eclogue of his Shepherd's Pipe is thought, 
not improbably, to have been in the recollection of 
Milton, when he wrote Lycidas. Like that poem, it 
is an elegy on the death of a friend. The line marked in 
the following quatrain might have appeared in Lycidas, 
without any injury to it. It is, indeed, very Miltonic : — 

In deepest passions of my grief- swol'n breast, 
Sweet soul ! this only comfort seizeth me, 

That so few years should make thee so much blest, 
And give such wings to reach eternity. 

In this poem is a description of autumn, in which the 
different metres are unfortunately but ill-assorted: — 
they look like bits of elegies begun on different plans ; 
but the third line of the first quatrain is well felt ; 
the fourth not unworthy of it ; the watery meadows 
are capitally painted; and the closing stanza is like 
an affecting one taken out of some old English 
ballad : — 



166 A JAR OF HONEY FEOM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Autumn it was, when droop'd the sweetest flowers, 
And rivers, swollen with pride, o'eiiook'd the hanks ; 

Poor greiv the day of summer's golden hours, 
And void of sap stood Ida's cedar ranks. 

The pleasant meadows sadly lay 

In chill and cooling sweats 
By rising fountains, or as they 

Fear'd winter's wasteful threats. 

Against the broad- spread oaks 

Each wind in fury bears ; 
Yet fell their leaves not half so fast 
As did the shepherd's tears. 

The feeling of analogy between the oak, with its 

scattered leaves, and the naturally strong man shedding 

tears for sorrow, is in the best imaginative taste. Had 

Browne written all thus, he would have found plenty of 

commentators. The Shepherd'' s Pipe was a somewhat 

later production than the other pastorals ; and had he 

lived, he would probably have surpassed all that his 

youth produced. Unfortunately, his mind never appears 

to have outgrown a certain juvenile ambition of ingenious 

thoughts and conceits ; and it is these that render it so 

difficult to make any long quotation from his works. 

The sixth line in the following is very obscure, perhaps 

corrupted. But the rest has great liveliness and 

nature : — 

Look as a lover, with a lingering kiss, 
About to part with the best half that's his ; 



ENGLISH PASTOKAL. 167 

Fain would he stay, but that he fears to do it, 

And curseth time for so fast hastening to it ; 

Now takes his leave, and yet begins anew 

To make less vows than are esteem'd true ; 

Then says he must be gone, and then doth find 

Something he should have spoke that's out of mind ; 

And whilst he stands to look for' t in her eyes, 

Their sad sweet glance so ties his faculties 

To think from what he parts, that he is now 

As far from leaving her, or knowing how, 

As when he came ; begins his former strain, 

To kiss, to vow, and take his leave again ; 

Then turns, comes back, sighs, parts, and yet doth go, 

Apt to retire, and loth to leave her so ; — 

Brave stream, so part I from thy flowery bank. 

Browne is fond of drawing his similes from real, and 
even homely life, and often seems to introduce them for the 
purpose of giving that kind of variety to a pastoral, other- 
wise ideal ; for though the title of his poem is British, 
and the scene also, it is in other respects Arcadian and 
Pagan. The effect is somewhat jarring ; and yet it is 
impossible to quarrel with the particular descriptions : — 

As children on a play-day leave the schools, 
And gladly run into the swimming pools ; 
Or in the thickets, all with nettles stung, 
Kush to despoil some sweet thrush of her young ; 
Or with their hats for fish lade in a brook 
Withouten pain ; but when the morn doth look 
Out of the eastern gates, a snail would faster 
Glide to the schools, than they unto their master ; 
So when before I sung the songs of birds, &c. 



168 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

The following is a complete picture : — 

— As a nimble squirrel from the wood, 
Ranging the hedges for his filbert food, 
Sits partly on a bough, his brown nuts cracking, 
And from the shell the sweet white kernel taking, 
Till, with their crooks and bags, a sort of boys 
To share with him, come with so great a noise, 
That he is forced to leave a nut nigh broke, 
And for his life leap to a neighbour oak, 
Thence to a beech, thence to a row of ashes, 
"Whilst through the quagmires and red water plashes 
The boys run dabbling through thick and thin ; 
One tears his hose, another breaks his shin ; 
This, torn and tattered, hath with much ado 
Got to the briers, and that hath lost his shoe ; 
This dropt his band, that headlong falls for haste, 
Another cries behind for being last; 
With sticks and stones, and many a sounding hollow, 
The little pool with no small sport they follow, 
Whilst he from tree to tree, from spray to spray 
Gets to the wood, and hides him in his dray ; 
Such shift made Riot, ere he could get up, &c. 

Here is another picture, still homelier, but equally 

complete, and as robust in its full-grown strength as the 

other is light and boyish : — 

As when a smith and's man (lame Vulcan's fellows), 

Called from the anvil or the puffing bellows 

To clap a well- wrought shoe, for more than pay, 

Upon a stubborn nag of Galloway, 

Or unback'd jennet, or a Flanders mare, 

That at the forge stands snuffing of the air ; 

The swarthy smith spits in his buck-horn fist , 



ENGLISH PASTOBAL. 169 

And bids his men bring out the five-fold twist, 

His shackles, shacklocks, hampers, gyves, and chains, 

His linked bolts ; and with no little pains 

These make him fast ; and lest all these should faulter, 

Unto a post, with some six-doubled halter, 

He binds his head ; yet all are of the least 

To curb the fury of the headstrong beast ; 

When, if a carrier's jade be brought unto him, 

His man can hold his foot while he can shoe him ; 

Remorse was so enforced to bind him stronger. 

This is a Dutch picture, or one that Mr. Crabbe 
might have admired. The following might have 
adorned the pages of Spenser himself. The ascension 
of the fogs and mists, and the cessation of all noise, are 
in a true — nay, in a high spirit of grandeur ; and the 
very delicacy of the conclusion adds to it. The sense 
of hushing solemnity is drawn to the finest point : — 

Now great Hyperion left his golden throne, 

That on the dancing waves in glory shone ; 

For whose declining on the western shore 

The oriental hills black mantles wore ; 

And thence apace the gentle twilight fled, 

That had from hideous caverns ushered 

All-drowsy Night ; who in a car of jet, 

By steeds of iron-grey (which mainly sweat 

Moist drops on all the world) drawn through the sky, 

The helps of darkness waited orderly. 

First, thick clouds rose from all the liquid plains ; 

Then mists from marishes, and grounds whose veins 

Were conduit-pipes to many a crystal spring ; 

From standing pools and fens were following 



170 A JAR OF HONE? FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Unhealthy fogs ; each river, every rill, 
Sent up their vapours to attend her will. 
These pitchy curtains drew 'twixt earth and heaven, 
And as Night's chariot through the air was driven, 
Clamour grew dumb ; unheard was shepherd's song, 
And silence girt the woods : no warbling tongue 
Talk'd to the echo ; satyrs broke their dance, 
And all the upper world lay in a trance ; 
Only the curling streams soft chidings kept : 
And little gales, that from the green leaf swept 
Dry summer's dust, in fearful whispering stirrd 
As loth to waken any singing bird. 

Browne was a Devonshire man, and is supposed to 
have died at Ottery St. Mary, the birthplace of Coleridge. 
He was not unworthy to have been the countryman of 
that exquisite observer of Nature, himself a pastoral man, 
though he wrote no pastorals ; for Coleridge not only 
preferred a country to a town life, but his mind as well 
as his body (when it was not with Plato and the school- 
men) delighted to live in woody places, " enfolding," as 
he beautifully says, 

Sunny spots of greenery. 

And how many other great and good men have there 
not been, with whom the humblest lover of Arcady may, 
in this respect, claim fellowship ? — men, nevertheless, 
fond of town also, and of the most active and busy life, 
when it was their duty to enter it. The most universal 
genius must of necessity include the green districts of 



ENGLISH PASTORAL. 171 

the world in his circle, otherwise he would not run it a 

third part round. Shakspeare himself, prosperous 

manager as he was, retired to his native place before he 

was old. Do we think that, with all his sociality, his 

chief companions there were such as a country town 

afforded ? Depend upon it, they were the trees, and the 

fields, and his daughter Susanna. Be assured, that no 

gentleman of the place was seen so often pacing the 

banks of the Avon, sitting on the stiles in the meadows, 

looking with the thrush at the sunset, or finding 

Books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 

Cervantes, the Shakspeare of Spain, (for if his poetry 
answered but to one small portion of Shakspeare, his 
prose made up the rest,) proclaims his truly pastoral 
heart, notwithstanding his satire, not only in his 
Galatea, but in a hundred passages of Don Quixote, 
particularly the episodes. He delighted equally in 
knowledge of the world and the most ideal poetic life. 
It is easy to see, by the stories of Marcella and 
Leandra, that this great writer wanted little to have 
become a Quixote himself, in the Arcadian line ! Nothing 
but the extremest good sense supplied him a proper 
balance in this respect for his extreme romance. 

Boccaccio was another of these great child-like minds, 
whose knowledge of the world is ignorantly confounded 



172 A JAB OF HONEY FEOM MOUNT HYBLA. 

with a devotion to it. See, in his Admetus, and 
Theseicl, and Genealogia Deorum, &c, and in the 
Decameron itself, how he revels in groves and gardens ; 
and how, when he begins making a list of trees, he 
cannot leave off. Doubtless, he had been of a more 
sensual temperament than Cervantes; but his faith 
remained unshaken in the highest things. His veins 
might have contained an excess of the genial ; but so did 
his heart. When the priest threatened him in advanced 
life with the displeasure of Heaven, he was shocked and 
alarmed, and obliged to go to Petrarch for comfort. 

Chaucer was a courtier, and a companion of princes ; 
nay, a reformer also, and a stirrer out in the world. He 
understood that world, too, thoroughly, in the ordinary 
sense of such understanding ; yet, as he was a true great 
poet in everything, so in nothing more was he so than 
in loving the country, and the trees and fields. It is as 
hard to get him out of a grove as his friend Boccaccio ; 
and he tells us, that, in May, he would often go out into 
the meadows to " abide " there, solely in order to " look 
upon the daisy." Milton seems to have made a point 
of never living in a house that had not a garden to it. 

A certain amount of trusting goodness, surviving 
twice the worldly knowledge possessed by those who 
take scorn for superiority, is the general characteristic 
of men of this stamp, whether of the highest order of 



ENGLISH PASTOEAL. 173 

that stamp or not. Cowley, Thomson, and Shenstone 

were such men. Shenstone was deficient in animal 

spirits, and condescended to be vexed when people did 

not come to see his retirement ; but few men had an 

acuter discernment of the weak points of others and the 

general mistakes of mankind, as anybody may see by his 

Essays ; and yet in those Essays he tells us, that he 

never passed a town or village, without regretting that 

he could not make the acquaintance of some of the good 

people that lived there. Thomson's whole poetry may 

be said to be pastoral, and everybody knows what a good 

fellow he was ; how beloved by his friends ; how social, 

and yet how sequestered ; and how he preferred a house 

but a floor high at Kichmond (for that which is now 

shown as his, was then a ground-floor only), to one of 

more imposing dimensions amidst 

The smoke and stir of this dim spot, 
Which men call London. 

Cowley was a partisan, a courtier, a diplomatist ; nay, a 

satirist, and an admirable one, too. See his Cutter of 

Coleman Street, the gaiety and sharpness of which no 

one suspects who thinks of him only in the ordinary 

peacefulness of his reputation; though, doubtless, he 

would have been the first man to do a practical kindness 

to any of the Puritans whom he laughed at. His friends 

the Cavaliers thought he laughed at themselves, in this 



174 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

very comedy ; so much more did lie gird hypocrisy and 
pretension in general than in the particular : but Charles 
the Second said of him after his death, that he had 
"not left a better man behind him in England." His 
partisanship, his politics, his clever satire, his once 
admired "metaphysical" poetry, as Johnson calls it, 
nobody any longer cares about ; but still, as Pope said, 

We love the language of his heart. 
He has become a sort of poetical representative of all 
the love that existed of groves and gardens in those days 
— of parterres, and orchards, and stately old houses; 
but above all, of the cottage ; a taste for which, as a 
gentleman's residence, seems to have originated with 
him, or at least been first avowed by him ; for we can 
trace it no farther back. " A small house and a large 
garden " was his aspiration ; and he obtained it. Some- 
body, unfortunately, has got our Cowley's Essays — we 
don't reproach him, for it is a book to keep a good 
while ; but they contain a delightful passage on this 
subject, which should have been quoted. Take, however, 
an extract or two from the verses belonging to those 
Essays. They will conclude this part of our subject well: 

Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good ! 

Hail, ye plebeian underwood ! 

Where the poetic birds rejoice, 
And for their quiet nests and plenteous food, 

Pay with their grateful voice. 



ENGLISH PASTOKAL. 175 

Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying, 
Hear the soft winds above me flying, 
With all their wanton boughs dispute, 

And the more tuneful birds to both replying, 
Nor be myself, too, mute. 

Ah! wretched and too solitary he, 
Who loves not his own company ! 
He'll feel the weight of it many a day, 
Unless he call in sin or vanity, 
To help to bear 't away. 

****** 
When Epicurus to the world had taught 

That Pleasure was the Chiefest Good, 
(And was, perhaps, i' th i right, if rightly understood,) 

His life he to his doctrine brought, 
And in a garden's shade that sovereign pleasure sought. 
****** 

Where does the wisdom and the power divine 

In a more bright and sweet reflection shine — 

Where do we finer strokes and colours see 

Of the Creator's real poetry, 

Than when we with attention look 

Upon the third day's volume of the book ? 

If we could open and intend our eye, 

We all, like Moses, should espy, 

Ev'n in a bush, the radiant Deity. 

****** 
Methinks I see great Diocletian walk 

In the Salonian garden's noble shade, 

Which by his own imperial hands was made. 
I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk 

With the ambassadors, who come in vain 

To entice him to a throne again. 



176 



A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 



" If I, my friends," said he, " should to yon show 
All the delights which in these gardens grow, 
'Tis likelier much that you should with me stay, 
Than His that you should carry me away ; 
And trust rne not, my friends, if every day 
I walk not here with more delight, 
Than ever, after the most happy fight, 
In triumph to the capitol I rode, 
To thank the gods, and to be thought, myself, almost a god. " 

A noble line that — long and stately as the triumph 
which it speaks of. Yet the Emperor and the Poet 
agreed in preferring a walk down an alley of roses. 
There was nothing so much calculated to rebuke or 
bewilder them there, as in the faces of their fellow- 
creatures, even after the "happiest fight." 




( 177 ) 



CHAPTER X. 

RETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT jETNA. 

SUBJECT OF MOUNT .ETNA RESUMED : ITS BEAUTIES ITS 

H0EE0ES EEASON WHY PEOPLE ENDURE THEM. LOVE- 

STOEY OF AN EAETHQUAKE. 




TN now emphatically 
returning to Sicily, 
though we have never 
been entirely absent 
from it, while discus- 
&^ sing the pastoral poets 
of other countries, we 
12 



178 A JAR OF HONEY FEOM MOUNT HYBLA. 

shall round our subject properly by finishing the circle 
where we began it ; and in order to render our plan as 
complete as possible, we have not been without a sense 
of chronological order. In resuming, therefore, the 
subject of iEtna, we proceed to regard the mountain 
in relation to the impression it makes on modern times 
and existing inhabitants. 

The reader is aware that our Jar was not intended 
to be associated with nothing but sweets. Bees, it was 
observed, extract honey from the bitterest as well as 
sweetest flowers ; and we only stipulated, as they do, 
for a sweet result ; — for something, which by the fact of 
its being deducible from bitterness, shows the tendency 
of Nature to that dulcet end, and gives a lesson to her 
creature man to take thought and warning, and do as 
much for himself. In truth, were man heartily to do 
so, and leave off asking Nature to superintend every- 
thing for him, and take the trouble off his hands, which 
it seems a manifest condition of things that she should 
not (man looking very like an experiment to see how far 
he can develop the energies of which he is composed, 
and prove himself worthy of continuance), how are we 
to know that he would not get rid of all such evils as do 
not appear to be necessary to his well-being, and, in the 
language of the great Eastern poet, make " the morning 
stars sing for joy ?"— sing for joy, that another heaven 



RETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT ^TNA. 179 

is added to their list. Mount iEtna, for instance, which 
is one of the safety-valves of the globe, does not force 
people to live within the sphere of its operations. Why, 
therefore, should they ? Why do not the inhabitants of 
Catania and other places migrate, as nations have done 
from the face of an enemy or famine, and plant them- 
selves elsewhere? When the convulsion comes, and 
destruction hovers over them, the saints are implored as 
the gods were of old, and everything is referred to the 
ordinances of Heaven. But the saints might answer, 
" Why do you continue to live here, in the teeth of 
these repeated warnings ? Why cannot the earth have 
safety-valves, but you must needs plant yourselves right 
in the way of them, as infants may do with steam- 
engines ?" This is the honey that might be extracted 
from the bitter past. On the other hand, if this be idle 
speculation, and the reason of the thing be on the side 
of continuing to implore the saints and perishing in 
earthquakes, then Nature, who is always determined to 
have no evil unmixed, suggests topics of consolation 
from the greater amount of good ; from the far longer 
duration of the periods of serenity and joy around the 
mountain, compared with those of convulsion ; and from 
all those images of beauty and abundance, which pro- 
duce another honey against the bitterness of what 
cannot be altered. The bee himself, like the nightin- 



180 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

gale and the dove, and other beautiful creatures, is an 
inhabitant of ./Etna. The fires of the mountain help to 
produce some of his sweetest thyme. The energetic 
little, warmth-loving, honey-making, armed, threatening, 
murmuring, bitter-sweet, and useful creature, seems like 
one of the particles of the mountain, gifted with wings. 
We might as well have brought our honey from Mount 
iEtna as Mount Hybla, and very likely it actually came 
thence ; only the latter, like Mount Hymettus, is iden- 
tified with the word, and its supposed district still 
famous for the product. In fact (though the name 
seems to be no longer retained anywhere) there were 
several Hyblas of old, one of them at the foot of iEtna ; 
so that our Jar may come from both places. The word, 
which is older than Greek, was probably Phoenician, 
from a root signifying mellifluence ; unless it originated 
in the sound of the bubbling of brooks, of the neigh- 
bourhood of which bees are fond. 

We cannot quit Mount JEtna without saying some- 
thing more of it, especially as it has lately been in 
action, not without hints of its operation as far as 
Scotland, where there have been many shocks of earth- 
quake. Everybody knows that JEtna is the greatest 
volcano in Europe, some twenty miles in ascent from 
Catania, and with a circumference for its base of between 
eighty and ninety. All the climates of the world are 



BETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT iBTNA. 181 

there, except those of the African desert. At the foot 
are the palms and aloes of the tropics, with the corn, 
wine, and oil of Italy. The latter continue for fourteen 
or fifteen miles of ascent. Then come the chestnuts of 
Spain, then the beeches of England, then the firs of 
Norway — the whole forest-belt being five or six miles 
in ascent, interspersed with park-like scenery, and the 
most magnificent pastures. Singing-birds, and flocks 
and herds are there, with abundance of game. The 
remainder, a thousand feet high, is a naked peak, 
covered for the greater part of the year with snow, but 
often hot to the feet in the midst of it, toilsome to 
ascend, and terminating in the great crater, miles 
in circumference, fuming and blind with smoke — the 
largest of several others. The whole mountain, with 
an enormous chasm in its side four or five miles broad, 
stands in the midst of six-and-thirty subject mountains, 
" each a Vesuvius," generated by its awful parent. 
Horror and loveliness prevail throughout it, alternately, 
or together. You look from mountain to mountain, 
over tremendous depths, to the most beautiful woody 
scenery. The lowest region is a paradise, betraying 
black grounds of lava, and beds of ashes, which remind 
you to what it is liable. The top is a ghastly white 
peak, shivering with cold, though it is a mouth for fire, 
but lovely at a distance in the light of the moon at 



182 A JAE OF HONEY FKOM MOUNT HYBLA. 

night, and presenting a view from it by day, especially 
at sunrise, which baffles description with ecstasy. Count 
Stolberg, a German poet, who beheld this spectacle in 
the year 1792, when the mountain was in action, says, 
that by the dawning light of the day he saw nothing 
round about him but snow and black ashes, vast masses 
of lava, and a smoking crater, together with a huge 
bed of clouds, the darkening extremities of which the 
eye could not clearly distinguish either from the moun- 
tains or the sea, " till the majestic sun rose in Jive, and 
reduced every object to order. — Chaos seemed to unfold 
itself, where no four-footed beast, no bird, interrupted 
the solemn silence of the formless *void : 

Wo sie keinen Todten begruben, und keiner. erstehen wird, 

as Klopstock says of the ice-encircled pole : 

No dead are buried there ; nor any there will rise. 

"iEtna cast his black shades," continues he, " over 
the grey dawn of the western atmosphere ; while round 
him stood his sons, but far beneath, yet volcanic moun- 
tains all, in number six-and-thirty, each a Vesuvius. 
To the north, the east, and the south, Sicily lay at our 
feet, with its hills, and rivers, and lakes, and cities. In 
the low deep, the clouds, tinged with purple, were dis- 
persed and vanished from the presence of the golden 



BETUEN TO SICILY AND MOUNT .ETNA. 183 

sun; while their shades flying "before the west wind, 
were scattered over the landscape far and wide." * 

Mr. Hughes's description is minuter, yet still more 
effective. "At length," says he, "faint streaks of light, 
shooting athwart the horizon, which became brighter 
and brighter, announced the approach of the great 
luminary; and when he sprang up in his majesty, 
supported on a throne of radiant clouds, that fine 
scriptural image of the giant rejoicing to run his course, 
flashed across my mind. As he ascended in the sky, 
the mountain tops began to stream with golden light, 
and new beauties successively developed themselves, 
until day dawned upon the Catanian plains. Sicily then 
lay expanded like a map beneath our eyes, presenting a 
very curious effect ; nearly all its mountains could be 
descried, with the many cities that surmount their 
summits ; more than half its coasts, with their bays, 
indentations, towns, and promontories, could be traced, 
as well as the entire course of rivers, sparkling like 
silver bands that encircle the valleys and the plains. 
Add to this the rich tints of so delightful an atmosphere ; 
add the dark blue tract of sea rolling its mysterious 
waves, as it were, into infinite space ; add that spirit of 
antiquity which lingers in these charming scenes, in- 

* Travels through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, &c. Translated by 
Holcroft, vol. iv. p. 298. 



184 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

fusing a soul into the features of nature, as expression 
lights up a beautiful countenance ; and where will you 
find a scene to rival that which is viewed from iEtna?"* 
Compare this spectacle with one of the great erup- 
tions, and the agonizing days that precede it. Smoke 
and earthquake commence them. The days are darkened; 
the nights are sleepless and horrible, and seem ten 
times as long as usual. People rush to the churches in 
prayer, or crowd the doorways (which are thought the 
safest places), or remain out of doors in boats or car- 
riages. Religious processions move in terror through 
the streets. Sometimes the air is blackened with a 
powder, sometimes with ashes, which fall and gather 
everywhere, such as Pompeii was buried with. Light- 
nings play about iEtna ; the sea rises against the dark 
atmosphere, in ghastly white billows ; dreadful noises 
succeed, accompanied with thunder, like batteries of 
artillery ; the earth rocks ; landslips take place down 
the hill-sides, carrying whole fields and homesteads into 
other men's grounds ; cities are overthrown, burying 
shrieking thousands. At length, the mountain bursts 
out in flame and lava, perhaps in forty or fifty places at 
once, the principal crater throwing out hot glowing 
stones, which have been known to be carried eighteen 

* Quoted in Evans's Classic and Connoisseur in Italy and Sicily, 
vol. ii. p. 358. 



RETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT ^ETNA. 185 

miles, and the frightful mineral torrent running forth 
in streams of fiery red, pouring down into the plains, 
climbing over walls, effacing estates, and rushing into 
and usurping part of the bed of the sea. A river of 
lava has been known to be fifty feet deep, and four miles 
broad. * Fancy such a stream coming towards London, 
as wide as from Marylebone to Mile End ! By degrees, 
the lava thickens into a black and rustling semi-liquid, 
rather pushed along than flowing ; though its heat has 
been found lingering after a lapse of eight years. When 
the survivors of all these horrors gather breath, and 
look back upon time and place, they find houses and 
families abolished, and have to begin, as it were, their 
stunned existence anew. 

Yet they build again over these earthquakes. They 
inhabit and delight in this mountain. Catania, the city 
at its foot, which has been several times demolished, 
is one of the gayest in Italy. 

How is this ? 

The reason is, that all pain, generally speaking, is 
destined to be short and fugitive, compared with the 
duration of a greater amount of pleasure ;— that the 
souls which perish in the convulsion, were partakers of 
that pleasure for the greater part of their lives, perhaps 
the gayest of the gay city ;— that all of them were born 
* Swinburne's Travels in the Two Sicilies, vol. iv. p. 148. 



186 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

there, or connected with it ; — that it is inconvenient, 
perhaps without government aid impossible, to remove, 
and commence business elsewhere ; — that they do not 
think the catastrophe likely to recur soon, perhaps not 
in the course of their lives ; — nay, that possibly there 
may be something of a gambling excitement, — of the 
stimulus of a mixture of hope and fear, — in thus living 
on the borders of life and death — of this great snap- 
dragon bowl of Europe — especially surrounded as they 
are with the old familiar scenes, and breathing a joyous 
atmosphere. But undoubtedly the chief reasons are 
necessity, real or supposed, and the natural tendency of 
mankind to make the best of their position and turn 
their thoughts from sadness. So the Catanian goes to 
his dinner, and builds a new ball-room out of the lava ! 

Perhaps the most touching of all the consolations to 
be met with in the history of these catastrophes, is the 
testimony they bear to the maternal affections. The 
men who perish from the overthrow of houses are said 
to be generally found in attitudes of resistance : — the 
women are bent double over their children. The great 
vindication of evil is, that (constituted as we are) we 
could not know so much joy, nor manifest so much 
virtue without it ; and certainly, in instances like these, 
it fetches out, under circumstances of the extremest 
weakness, the most beautiful strength of the human 



RETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT ^ETNA. 187 

heart. Still, sucli wholesale trials of it do not appear 
to be demanded by any unavoidable necessity. The fact 
forces itself upon the mind, that human beings need not 
continue to live in such places, and that the geological 
well-being of the globe does not demand it. As to 
animals of the inferior creation, who are destroyed at 
these times, assuredly they know almost as little about 
it till the last moment, as the lamb who licks the hand 
of his slayer ; and as soon as the mountain is cleared, 
the larks and nightingales are again singing, and the 
bees enjoying the flowers in its most awful ravines. 

For months, for years, sometimes for a hundred 
years and more, perhaps for many hundreds, this 
tremendous phenomenon is quiet. Homer does not 
seem to have heard of its burning. The volcano first 
makes its appearance in Pindar. Theocritus knew its 
capabilities well ; yet he speaks of it as nothing but a 
seat of pastoral felicity. His Polyphemus contrasts its 
serenity with the dangers of the sea ; and another of 
his shepherds, in answer to an observation about fathers 
and mothers, says to a shepherd of the plains, that 
.ZEtna is his mother, and that he is as rich in sheep 
and goats as the latter fancies himself to be during 
dreams. The first recorded eruption of JEtna was in 
the time of Empedocles, about five hundred years before 
Christ ; and from that time to the year 1819 inclusive, 



188 A JAE OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

a French writer has calculated that there have been 
seventy-two others mentioned* We cannot say how 
many more have ensued. The one that not long ago 
took place was harmless, we believe, as far as lives were 
concerned, except to some rash persons who were too 
anxious to see the effect of the lava upon a pool of 
water. The pool turned into steam, and scalded them. 
Slight eruptions are little regarded, and indeed are little 
dangerous compared with what precedes them. The 
worst peril is the earthquake. The lava, though an 
ugly customer, can be safelier treated with. Even slight 
earthquakes are not much heeded, after the first alarm. 
Mr. Vaughan, an English traveller in the year 1810, says, 
that upon his going into the town of Messina, after a 
slight shock, from his country-lodging, and approaching 
the carriages in which some ladies were sitting in expec- 
tation of another, he said to one of them, an acquaintance 
of his, " Is it not shocking ?" " It is indeed very shock- 
ing," said the lady. " You were not at the Opera ?" f 
Humboldt speaks of a young lady in South America, who 
was so accustomed to these visitations, that she thought 
the topic vulgar. She expressed a wish that people 
would leave off talking about " these nasty earthquakes." 



* Voyage Critique a VJEtna, torn. i. p. 529. 

f Vide the Letters appended to a View of the Present State of Italy, 
translated from the Italian, ~ky Thomas Wright Vaughan, Esq., p, 70. 



RETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT ^TNA. 189 

If you tell a Sicilian that there are no earthquakes 
in England, he acknowledges, of course, the merit of 
their absence, but smiles to think that you can suppose 
it a compensation for the want of vines and olives. 
The following amusing conversation took place in an 
inn, between the English traveller just mentioned and a 
priest and his landlady, at Caltagirone. The priest, 
" after many apologies for the liberty he was taking," 
says Mr. Vaughan, " begged to converse with me upon 
the subject of England, which the people of these parts 
were very anxious to hear about, as the opportunity of 
inquiring so seldom occurred ; and, by the time I had 
dined, I observed a dozen people collected round the 
door, with their eyes and mouths open, to hear the 
examination. 

"'And pray, Signor, is it true what we are told, 
that you have no olives in England ? ' * 

" ' Yes, perfectly true.' 

" ' Cospetto ! how so ? " 

" ' Cospettone /' f said the lady. 

"'Our climate is not propitious to the growth of 
the olive.' 

" 'But then, Signor, for oranges !' 

* "Olives and bread form the principal part of the food of- the lower 
classes in Sicily, and oil is a necessary of life." 

f " About equivalent to ' zounds ' and ' gadzooks.' " 



190 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HtBLA. 

" ' We have no oranges neither.' 
" ' Poveretto /' said the landlady, with a tone of 
compassion ; which is a sort of fondling diminutive of 
' Povero,' ' Poor creature,' or as you would say to your 
child, ' Poor little fellow ! ' 

" i But how is that possible, Signer? ' said the priest. 
' Have you no fruit in your country ? ' 

"'We have very fine fruit; but our winters are 
severe, and not genial enough for the orange-tree.' 

" ' That is just what they told me,' said the lady, 
' at Palermo, that England is all snow, and a great 
many stones.' 

" 'But then, Signor, we have heard, what we can 
scarcely believe, that you have not any wine ? ' 

"'It is perfectly true. We have vines that bear 
fruit ; but the sun in our climate is not sufficiently 
strong, which must be boiling, as it is here, to produce 
any wine.' 

" ' Then, Jesu Maria ! how the deuce do you do ? ' 
" I told them that, notwithstanding, we got on 
pretty well ; that we had some decent sort of mutton, 
and very tolerable-looking beef; that our poultry was 
thought eatable, and our bread pretty good; that, in- 
stead of wine, we had a thing they call ale, which our 
people, here and there, seemed to relish exceedingly; 
and that, by the help of these articles, a good constitu- 



RETUBN TO SICILY AND MOUNT 3ETNA. 191 

tion, and the blessing of God, our men were as hardy, 
and as loyal and brave, and our women as accomplished, 
and virtuous, and handsome, as any other people, I 
believed, under heaven. 

" ' Besides, Mr. Abbate, I beg leave to ask you, what 
cloth is your coat of ? ' 

" ' Cospetto ! it is English ! ' with an air of import- 
ance. 

" ' And your hat ! ' 

" ' Why, that's English.' 

" ' And this lady's gown, and her bonnet and rib- 
bons ? ' 

" ' Why, they are English.' 

" ' All English. Then you see how it is : we send 
you, in exchange for what we don't grow, half the com- 
forts and conveniences you enjoy in your island. Be- 
sides, padrona mia gentile (my agreeable landlady), we 
can never regret that we don't grow these articles, since 
it ensures us an intercourse with a nation we esteem ! ' 

" ' Viva I ' (' Long life to you '), said the landlady, and 
' Bravo ! ' said the priest ; and between bravo and viva, 
the best friends in the world, I escaped to my lettiga 
(litter)."* 

We must close this article with a love-story, in con- 
nexion with the dreadful earthquake of 1783, which 
* View of Italy, ut supra, p. 79. 



192 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

destroyed Messina, and swept into the sea, in one 
moment, nearly three thousand persons on the opposite 
coast of Scylla, together with their prince.* The 
reader may believe as much of the love as he pleases, 
but the extraordinary circumstance on which it turns is 
only one of a multitude of phenomena, all true and 
marvellous. 

Giuseppe, a young vine-grower in a village at the 
foot of the mountains looking towards Messina, was in 
love with Maria, the daughter of the richest bee-master 
of the place ; and his affection, to the great displeasure 
of the father, was returned. The old man, though he 
had encouraged him at first, wished her to marry a 
young profligate in the city, because the latter was 
richer and of a higher stock ; but the girl had a great 
deal of good sense as well as feeling ; and the father 
was puzzled how to separate them, the families having 
been long acquainted. He did everything in his power 
to render the visits of the lover uncomfortable to both 
parties ; but as they saw through his object, and love 
can endure a great deal, he at length thought himself 
compelled to make use of insult. Contriving, there- 
fore, one day to proceed from one mortifying word to 

* It is calculated that 40,000 souls perished in this convulsion. In 
the greatest of all the Sicilian earthquakes, that of 1693, the earth shook 
hut four minutes, and overthrew almost all the towns on the eastern 
side of the island. 



RETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT JETNA. 193 

another, he took upon him, as if in right of offence, to 
anticipate his daughter's attention to the parting guest, 
and show him out of the door himself, adding a broad 
hint that it might be as well if he did not return very 
soon. 

"Perhaps, Signor Antonio," said the 3^outh, piqued 
at last to say something harsh himself, " you do not 
wish the son of your old friend to return at all ? " 

" Perhaps not," said the bee-master. 

" What," said the poor lad, losing all the courage of 
his anger in the terrible thought of his never having 
any more of those beautiful lettings out of the door by 
Maria, — " what ! do you mean to say I may not hope to 
be invited again, even by yourself? — that you yourself 
will never again invite me, or come to see me?" 

" Oh, we shall all come, of course, to the great 
Signor Giuseppe," said the old man, looking scornful, — 
" all cap in hand." 

" Nay, nay," returned Giuseppe, in a tone of pro- 
pitiation; " I'll wait till you do me the favour to look 
in some morning, in the old way, and have a chat about 
the French; and perhaps," added he, blushing, "you 
will then bring Maria with you, as you used to do ; and 
I won't attempt to see her till then." 

" Oh, we'll all come of course," said Antonio, im- 
patiently ; " cat, dog, and all ; and when we do," added 

13 



194 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

he, in a very significant tone, " you may come again 
yourself." 

Giuseppe tried to laugh at this jest, and thus still 
propitiate him ; but the old man hastening to shut the 
door, angrily cried, "Ay, cat, dog, and all, and the 
cottage besides, with Maria's dowry along with it ; and 
then you may come again, and not till then." And so 
saying, he banged the door, and giving a furious look at 
poor Maria, went into another room to scrawl a note to 
the young citizen. 

The young citizen came in vain, and Antonio grew 
sulkier and angrier every clay, till at last he turned his 
bitter jest into a vow; exclaiming with an oath, that 
Giuseppe should never have his daughter, till he (the 
father), daughter, dog, cat, cottage, bee-hives, and all, 
with her dowry of almond-trees to boot, set out some 
fine morning to beg the young vine-dresser to accept 
them. 

Poor Maria grew thin and pale, and Giuseppe looked 
little better, turning all his wonted jests into sighs, and 
often interrupting his work to sit and look towards the 
said almond-trees, which formed a beautiful clump on 
an ascent upon the other side of the glen, sheltering the 
best of Antonio's bee-hives, and composing a pretty 
dowry for the pretty Maria, which the father longed to 
see in the possession of the flashy young citizen. 



RETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT iETNA. 195 

One morning, after a very sultry night, as the poor 
youth sat endeavouring to catch a glimpse of her in this 
direction, he observed that the clouds gathered in a very 
unusual manner over the country, and then hung low in 
the air, heavy and immovable. Towards Messina the 
sky looked so red, that at first he thought the city on 
fire, till an unusual heat affecting him, and a smell of 
sulphur arising, and the little river at his feet assuming 
a tinge of a muddy ash-colour, he knew that some con- 
vulsion of the earth was at hand. His first impulse 
was a wish to cross the ford, and, with mixed anguish 
and delight, to find himself again in the cottage of 
Antonio, giving the father and daughter all the help in 
his power. A tremendous burst of thunder and light- 
ning startled him for a moment ; but he was proceeding 
to cross, when his ears tingled, his head turned giddy, 
and while the earth heaved beneath his feet, he saw the 
opposite side of the glen lifted up with a horrible deafen- 
ing noise, and then the cottage itself, with all around it, 
cast, as he thought, to the ground, and buried for ever. 
The sturdy youth, for the first time in his life, fainted 
away. When his senses returned, he found himself 
pitched back into his own premises, but not injured, the 
blow having been broken by the vines. 

But on looking in horror towards the site of the 
cottage up the hill, what did he see there ? or rather, 



196 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

what did lie not see there ? And what did he see, 
forming a new mound, furlongs down the side of the 
hill, almost at the bottom of the glen, and in his own 
homestead ? 

Antonio's cottage : — Antonio's cottage, with the 
almond-trees, and the bee-hives, and the very cat and 
dog, and the old man himself, and the daughter (both 
senseless), all come, as if, in the father's words, to beg 
him to accept them ! Such awful pleasantries, so to 
speak, sometimes take place in the middle of Nature's 
deepest tragedies, and such exquisite good may spring- 
out of evil. 

For it was so in the end, if not in the intention. 
The old man (who, together with his daughter, had only 
been stunned by terror) was superstitiously frightened 
by the dreadful circumstance, if not affectionately moved 
by the attentions of the son of his old friend, and the 
delight and religious transport of his child. Besides, 
though the cottage and the almond-trees, and the 
bee-hives, had all come miraculously safe down the 
hill (a phenomenon which has frequently occurred 
in these extraordinary landslips), the flower-gardens, 
on which his bees fed, were almost all destroyed; 
his property was lessened, his pride lowered; and 
when the convulsion was well over, and the guitars 
were again playing in the valley, he consented to 



RETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT ^TNA. 197 

become the inmate, for life, of the cottage of the en- 
chanted couple. 

He could never attain, however, to the innate deli- 
cacy of his child, and he would sometimes, with a petu- 
lant sigh, intimate at table what a pity it was that she 
had not married the rich and high-feeding citizen. At 
such times as these, Maria would gather one of her 
husband's feet between her own under the table, and 
with a squeeze of it that repaid him tenfold for the 
mortification, would steal a look at him which said, " I 
possess all which it is possible for me to desire." 




193 



A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 



CHAPTER XI. 

BEES. 

THE BEAUTIFUL NEVER TO BE THANKED TOO MUCH, OR TO BE 

SUFFICIENTLY EXPRESSED. BEES AND THEIR ELEGANCE. 

THEIR ADVICE TO AN ITALIAN POET. WAXEN TAPERS. A 

BEE DRAMA. MASSACRES OF DRONES. HUMAN PROGRESSION. 

TT would be un- 
grateful and 

impossible, in the 
course of so sweet 
and generous a 
theme as our Jar 
of Honey has fur- 
nished us with, 
not to devote a 
portion of it to 
the cause of all 
its sweetness — the Bee. We 
are not going, however, to re- 
peat more common-place in its 
— eulogy than we can help. The 
grounds of the admiration of 
nature are without end ; and as 
to those matters of fact or 




BEES. 



199 



science which appear to be settled—nay, even most 
settled — some new theory is coming up every day, in 
these extraordinary times, to compel us to think the 
points over again, and doubt whether we are quite so 
knowing as we supposed. Not only are bee-masters 
disputing the discoveries of Huber respecting the opera- 
tions of the hive, but searchers into nature seem almost 
prepared to re-open the old question respecting the 
equivocal generation of the bee, and set the electrical 
experiments of Mr. Cross at issue with the conclusions 
of Eedi. 

How this may turn out, we know not ; but sure we 
are, that it will be a long time indeed before the praise 
and glory of the bee can have exhausted its vocabulary 
— before people cry out to authors, " Say no more ; you 
have said too much already of its wonderfulness — too 
much of the sweetness and beauty of its productions." 
Too much, we are of opinion, cannot be said of any 
marvel in nature, unless it be trivial or false. The old 
prosaical charge against hyperbolical praises of the beau- 
tiful, we hold to be naught. Ask a lover, and he will 
say, and say truly, that no human terms can do justice 
to the sweetness in his mistress's eyes — to the virgin 
bloom on her cheek. If words could equal them, 
Nature would hardly be our superior. Hear what is 
said on the point by Marlowe : — 



200 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

If all the pens that ever poets held 
Had fed the feelings of their masters' thoughts, 
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, 
Their minds, and muses on admired themes ; 
If all the heavenly quintessence they 'stil 
From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
The highest reaches of a human wit ; 
If these had made one poem's period, 
And all combined in beauty's worthiness, 
Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 
Which into words no virtue can digest. 



Did any one ever sufficiently admire the entire ele- 
gance of the habits and pursuits of bees ? their extrac- 
tion of nothing but the quintessence of the flowers ; 
their preference of those that have the finest and least 
adulterated odour ; their avoidance of everything squalid 
(so unlike flies) ; their eager ejection or exclusion of it 
from the hive, as in the instance of carcases of intruders, 
which, if they cannot drag away, they cover up and 
entomb ; their love of clean, quiet, and delicate neigh- 
bourhoods, thymy places with brooks ; their singularly 
clean management of so liquid and adhesive a thing as 
honey, from which they issue forth to their work as if 
they had had nothing to do with it ; their combination 
with honey-making of the elegant manufacture of wax, 
of which they make their apartments, and which is used 



BEES. 201 

by mankind for none but patrician or other choice pur- 
poses ; their orderly policy ; their delight in sunshine ; 
their attention to one another ; their apparent indiffer- 
ence to everything purely regarding themselves, apart 
from the common good ? A writer of elegant Italian 
verse, who recast the book of Virgil on Bees, has taken 
occasion of their supposed dislike of places abounding 
in echoes, to begin his poem with a pretty conceit. He 
was one of the first of his countrymen who ventured to 
dispense with rhyme ; and he makes the bees themselves 
send him a deputation, on purpose to admonish him not 
to use it : — 

Mentre era per cantare i vostri doni 
Con alte rime, o verginette caste, 
Vaghe angelette de le erbose rive, 
Preso dal sonno in sul spuntar de 1' alba, 
M' apparre un coro de la vostra gente, 
E da la lingua onde s' accoglie il mele, 
Sciolsono in chiara voce este parole : — 
" spirto amico, che dopo mill' anni 
E cinquecento rinnovar ti piace 
E le nostre faticlie e i nostri studi, 
Fuggi le rime e '1 rimbombar sonoro. 

" Tu sai pur che 1' immagin de la voce, 
Che risponde dai sassi ov' Eco alberga, 
Sempre nimica fu del nostro regno : 
Non sai tu ch' ella fu conversa in pietra, 
E fu inventrice de le prime rime ? 
E dei saper, ch' ove abita costei, 



202 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Null' ape abitar puo per 1' importuno 
Ed hnperfetto suo parlar loquace." 

Cosi diss' egli : poi tra labbro e labbro 
Mi pose un favo di soave mele, 
E lieto se n' ando volando al cielo. 
Ond' io, da tal divinita spirato, 
Non temero cantare i vostri onori 
Con verso Etnisco da le rime sciolto. 

E cantero, come il soave mele, 
Celeste don, sopra i fioretti e 1' erba 
L' aere distilla liquido e sereno ; 
E come 1' api industriose e caste 
L' adunino, e con studio e con ingegno 
Dappoi compongan le odorate cere, 
Per onorar 1' immagine di Dio ; — 
Spettacoli ed effetti vaghi e rari, 
Di maraviglie pieni e di bellezze. 

— Le Api del Rucellai. 

While bent on singing your delightful gifts 

In lofty rhyme, little virgins chaste, 

Sweet little angels of the flowery brooks, 

Sleep seized me on the golden point of morn, 

And I beheld a choir of your small people, 

Who, with the tongue with which they take the honey, 

Buzz'd forth in the clear air these earnest words : — 

" friendly soul, that after the long lapse 

Of thrice five hundred years, dost please thee sing 

Our toils and art, shun — shun, we pray thee, rhyme : 

Shun rhyme, and its rebounding noise. Full well 

Thou know'st, that the invisible voice which sits 

Answering to calls in rocks, Echo by name, 

Was hostile to us ever ; and thou know'st — 



BEES. 203 

Or dost thou not ? — that she, who was herself 
Turn'd to a hollow rock, first found out rhyme. 
Learn further then, that wheresoe'er she dwells, 
No bee can dwell, for very hate and dread 
Of her importunate and idle babble." 

Such were the words that issued from that choir ; 
Then 'twixt my lips they put some honey drops, 
And so in gladness took their flight aloft. 
Whence I, with such divinity made strong, 
Doubt not, bees, to sing your race renown'd 
In Tuscan verse, freed from the clangs of rhyme. 
Yea, I will sing how the celestial boon, 
Honey, by some sweet mystery of the dew, 
Is born of air in bosoms of the flowers, 
Liquid, serene ; and how the diligent bees 
Collect it, working further with such art, 
That odorous tapers thence deck holy shrines. 
sights, and effects, lovely and strange ! 
Full of the marvellous and the beautiful ! 

— The Bees of Rucellai. 

The reader need not be told, that the tapers here 
alluded to are those which adorn Catholic altars. 
Eucellai was a kinsman of Pope Leo the Tenth and 
his successor Clement ;'and his first mode of bespeaking 
favour for his bees was by associating them with the 
offices of the church. Beautiful are those tapers, with- 
out doubt ; and well might the poet express his admira- 
tion at their being the result of the work of the little 
unconscious insect, who compounded the material. So, 



204 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

in every wealthy Louse in England, every evening, 
where lamps do not take its place, the same beautiful 
substance is lit up for the inmates to sit by, at their 
occupations of reading, or music, or discourse. The 
bee is there, with her odorous ministry. In the morn- 
ing, she has probably been at the breakfast-table. In 
the morning, she is honey ; in the evening, the waxen 
taper ; in the summer noon, a voice in the garden, or 
the window ; in the winter, and at all other times, a 
meeter of us in books. She talks Greek to us in 
Sophocles and Theocritus ; Virgil's very best Latin, in 
his Georgics ; we have just heard her in Italian ; and 
besides all her charming associations with the poets in 
general, one of the Elizabethan men has made a whole 
play out of her,— a play in which the whole dramatis 
persona are bees ! And a very sweet performance it is 
according to Charles Lamb, who was not lavish of his 
praise. It was written by Thomas Day, one of the 
fellows of Massinger and Decker, and is called the 
Parliament of Bees. Lamb has given extracts from it 
in his Specimens of the Dramatic Poets, and says in a 

note : — 

The doings, 
The births, the wars, the wooings 

of these pretty winged creatures are, with continued 
liveliness, portrayed, throughout the whole of this 



BEES. 205 

curious old drama, in words which bees would talk 
with, could they talk ; the very air seems replete 
with humming and buzzing melodies while we read 
them. Surely bees were never so be-rhymed before." 
(Vol. ii., Moxon's latest edition, p. 130.) Would to 
heaven that a horrid, heavy-headed monster called 
Hepatitis — who has been hindering us from having our 
way of late in the most unseasonable manner, and is at 
this minute clawing our side and shoulder for our 
disrespect of him — would have allowed us to go to the 
British Museum, and read the whole play for ourselves. 
We might have been able to give the reader some 
pleasant tastes of it, besides those to be met with in 
Mr. Lamb's book. The following is a specimen. Klania, 
a female bee, is talking of her lovers : — 

Philon, a Bee 
Well skill' d in verse and amorous poetry, 
As we have sate at work, both on one rose* 
Has humm'd sweet canzons, both in verse and prose, 
Which I ne'er minded. Astrophel, a Bee 
(Although not so poetical as he), 
Yet in his full invention quick and ripe, 
In summer evenings on his well-tuned pipe, 

* " Prettily pilfered,'' says Lamb, " from the sweet passage in the 
Midsummer Night's Dream, where Helena recounts to Hermia their 
school-days' friendship : — 

' We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, 
Created with our needles both one flower, 
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion.' " 



206 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Upon a woodbine blossom in the sun, 

(Our hive being clean swept and our day's work done — ) 

Would play us twenty several tunes ; yet I 

Nor minded Astrophel, nor his melody. 

Then there 's Amniter, for whose love fair Leade 

(That pretty Bee) flies up and down the mead 

With rivers in her eyes — without deserving, 

Sent me trim acorn howls of his own carving, 

To drink May-dews and mead in. Yet none of these, 

My hive-horn playfellows and fellow Bees, 

Could I affect, until this strange Bee came. 

It is pretty clear, however, from this passage, that 
Mr. Lamb's usual exquisite judgment was seduced by 
the little loves and graces of these unexpected dramatis 
persona; for this is certainly not the way in which bees 
would talk. It is all human language, and unbeelike 
pursuits. " Eivers in her eyes " is beautifully said, but 
bees do not shed tears. They are no carvers of bowls ; 
and we have no reason to believe that they know any- 
thing of music and poetry. The bee 

Who, at her flowery work doth sing, 

sings like the cicada of Anacreon, with her wings. To 
talk as bees would talk we must divest ourselves of flesh 
and blood, and develop ideas modified by an untried 
mode of being, and by unhuman organs. We must talk 
as if we had membranaceous wings, a proboscis, and no 
knowledge of tears and smiles ; and, as to our loves, 



BEES. 207 

they would be confined to the queen and the drones — 
and very unloving and unpoetical work they would make 
of it. The rest of us would know nothing about it. We 
should love nothing but the flowers, the brooks, our 
two elegant manufactures of wax and honey, and the 
whole community at large — being very patriotic, but 
not at all amorous — more like tasteful Amazons than 
damsels of Arcadia ; ladies with swords by their sides, 
and not to be hummed by the beau-ideals of Mr. Thomas 
Day. 

These same formidable weapons of the bees, their 
stings, remind us of the only drawback on the pleasures 
of thinking about them — their massacres of the drones. 
Every year those gentlemen have to pay for their idle 
and luxurious lives by one great pang of abolition. 
They are all stung and swept away into nothingness ! 
Truly a circumstance to " give us pause," and perplex 
us with our wax and honey. It seems, however, to be 
the result of an irresistible impulse — some desperate 
necessity of state, for want of better knowledge, or more 
available powers. "We are to suppose them doing it 
unwillingly, with a horror of the task proportioned to 
the very haste and fury in which they perform it ; as 
though they wished to get it off their hands as fast as 
possible, terrified and agonized at the terror and agony 
which they inflict. Why they leave this tremendous 



208 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

flaw in their polity — why they govern for the most part 
so well, and yet have this ugly work to do in order to 
make all right at the year's end, is a question which 
human beings may discuss, when nations have come to 
years of discretion ; when they have grown wise enough, 
by the help of railroads and mutual benefits, to dispense 
with cuffing one another like a parcel of schoolboys. 
Mankind have not yet outlived their own massacres and 
revolutions long enough to have a right to be astonished 
at the massacres of the bees. What they ought to be 
astonished at, is their own notion of the beehive as a 
pattern of government, with this tremendous flaw in it 
staring them in the face. But we believe they have now 
become sensible of the awkwardness of the analogy. 
Assuredly we should find no Archbishop of Canterbury 
now-a-days arguing in the style of his predecessor, in 
the play of Henry the Fifth ; — 

So work the honey bees ; 
Creatures, that, by a rule in nature, teach 
The art of order to a peopled kingdom. 
They have a king, and officers of sorts : 
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home ; 
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad ; 
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings, 
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds ; 
Which pillage they, with merry march, bring home 
To the tent-royal of their emperor ; 
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys 



BEES. 209 

The singing masons building roofs of gold ; 
The civil citizens kneading up the honey ; 
The poor mechanic porters crowding in 
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate ; 
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum, 
Delivering o'er to executors pale 
The lazy yawning drone. 

Alas ! in Beedom, the archbishop himself, inas- 
much as he was no wax-chandler, would have been 
accounted one of these same lazy, yawning drones, and 
delivered over to the secular arm. Bees do not teach 
men, nor ought they. We have some higher things 
among us, even than wax and honey ; and though we 
have our flaws, too, in the art of government, and do 
not yet know exactly what to do with them, we hope we 
shall find out. Will the bees ever do that ? Do they 
also hope it ? Do they sit pondering, when the massacre 
is over, and think it but a bungling way of bringing 
their accounts right ? Man, in his self-love, laughs at 
such a fancy. He is of opinion that no creature can 
think, or make progression, but himself. What right 
he has, from his little experience, to come to such con- 
clusions, w T e know not; but he must allow, that we 
know as little of the conclusions of the bees. All we 
feel certain of is, that with bees, as with men, the good 
of existence outweighs the evil ; that evil itself is but a 
rough working towards good ; and that if good can 

14 



210 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. - 

ultimately be better without it, there is a thing called 
hope, which says it may be possible. We take our 
planet to be very young, and our love of progression to 
be one of the proofs of it ; and when we think of the 
good, and beauty, and love, and pleasure, and gene- 
rosity, and nobleness of mind and imagination, in which 
this green and glorious world is abundant, we cannot 
but conclude that the love of progression is to make it 
still more glorious, and add it to the number of those 
older stars, which are probably resting from their 
labours, and have become heavens. 




( 211 ) 



CHAPTER XII. 

i MISCELLANEOUS FEELINGS RESPECTING SICILY, ITS 
MUSIC, ITS RELIGION, AND ITS MODERN POETRY. 

DANTE'S EVENING. AVE MAEIA OF BYRON. THE SICILIAN 

VESPERS. NOTHING " INFERNAL " IN NATURE. SICILIAN 

MARINER'S HYMN. INVOCATION FROM COLERIDGE. — PAGAN 

AND ROMAN CATHOLIC WORSHIP. LATIN AND ITALIAN 

COUPLET. WINTER'S " RATTO DI PROSERPINA." A HINT ON 

ITALIAN AIRS. BELLINI. MELI, THE MODERN THEOCRITUS. 




IME flies, 
and friends 
must part. 
In closing 
our Blue 
Jar, a rosy 
light seems 
to come 
over it, at 
once beau- 
tiful and 
m e 1 a n- 
clioly ; for 
termina- 
tions are 



212 A JAR OF HONEY FEOM MOUNT HYBLA. 

farewells, and farewells remind us of evenings, and of 
the divine lines of the poet : — 

Era gia l'ora, che volge '1 desio 
A' naviganti, e intenerisce '1 cuore 
Lo di ch'an detto a' dolci araici A Dio : 

E che lo nuovo peregrin d'amore 
Punge, se ode squilla di lontano, 
Che paia '1 giorno pianger che si muore. 

'T was now the hour, when love of home melts through 
Men's hearts at sea, and longing thoughts portray 
The moment when they bade sweet friends adieu ; 

And the new pilgrim now, on his lone way, 
Thrills as he hears the distant vesper bell, 
That seems to mourn for the expiring day. 

Divine, indeed, are those lines of Dante. Why 
didn't he write all such, instead of employing two 
volumes out of three, to show us how much less he 
cared to be divine than infernal ? Was it absolutely 
necessary for him to have so much black ground for 
his diamonds ? 

And another poet who took to the black, or rather the 
burlesque, side of things, how could he write so beauti- 
fully on the same theme, and resist giving us whole 
poems as tender and confiding, to assist in making the 
world happy ? The stanza respecting the Ave Maria is 
surely the best in Don Juan : — 

Ave Maria ! blessed be the hour ! 

The time, the clime, the spot where I so oft 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, RELIGION, AND MODERN POETRY. 213 

Have felt the moment in its fullest power 
Sink o'er the earth, so beautiful and soft, 

While swung the deep bell in the distant tower, 
Or the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft, 

And not a breath crept through the rosy air, 

And yet the forest leaves seemed stirr'd with prayer. 

Not, we beg leave to say, that we are Koraan 
Catholic, either in our creed or our form of worship ; 
though we should be not a little inclined to become 
such, did the creed contain nothing harsher or less just 
than the adoration of maternity. We have been taught 
to be too catholic in the true sense of the word 
(Universal) to wish for any ultimate form of Christianity, 
except that which shall drop ail the perplexing thorns 
through which it has grown, and let the odour of its 
flower be recognized in its spotless force without one 
infernal embitterment. 

But it will be said that there are infernal embitter- 
ments even in the sweetest forms of things, whether we 
wdll have them or no — massacres in bee-hives, Dantes 
among the greatest poets, Sicilian Vespers. Think of 
those, it will be said. Think of the horrible massacre 
known by the name of the " Sicilian Vespers." Think 
of the day in your honeyed, Hyblaoan island, when the 
same hour which 

Sinks o'er the earth, so beautiful and soft, 



214 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

With not a breath, in its rosy air, and with the leaves of 
its trees moving as if they were lips of adoring silence, 
was the signal for an indiscriminate slaughter of men, 
women, and children ; ay, babes at the breast, and 
mothers innocent as the object of vesper worship. "Was 
there nothing infernal in that ? Is there nothing 
hellish, and of everlasting embitterment in the recol- 
lection ? 

No. And again a loud and happy No, of everlasting 
sweetness. 

The infernal and the everlastingly bitter imply the 
same things. There is nothing infernal that has a 
limit ; therefore there is nothing infernal in nature. 
Look round, and show it if you can. Nature will have 
no unlimited pain. The sufferer swoons, or dies, or 
endures ; but the limit comes. Death itself is but the 
dissolution of compounds that have either been dis- 
ordered or worn out, and therefore cannot continue 
pleasantly to co-exist. Horrible was this Sicilian 
massacre ; horrible and mad ; one of the wildest 
reactions against wickedness in human history. The 
French masters of the island had grown mad with 
power and debauchery, and the islanders grew mad with 
revenge. It was the story in little of the French 
Revolution ; not the Revolution of the Three Days, 
truly deserving the title of Glorious for its Christian 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, RELIGION, AND MODERN POETRY. 215 

forbearance; but the old, untaught, delirious, Kobes- 
pierre Kevolution . Dreadful is it to think of the vesper 
bell ringing to that soft worship of the mother of Jesus, 
and then of thousands of daggers, at the signal, 
leaping out of the bosoms of the worshippers, and 
plunging into the heart of every foreigner present, man, 
woman, and child. But there came an end; soon to 
the body ; sooner or later, to the mind. The dead were 
buried; the French government in the island was 
expelled, and a better brought in. The evil perished, 
good came out of it ; and myriads of vespers have taken 
place since then, but not one like that. Yes, myriads 
of vespers — a vesper every day, ever since — from the 
year 1282 to this present 1848, — all gentle, all secure 
from the like misery, all more or less worthy of the 
beautiful description of the poet. If the massacre 
called the Sicilian Vespers had been infernal, it would 
have been going on now ! and nature has not made 
such hellish enormities possible. The only durability 
to which she tends is a happy one. Her shortest lives 
(generally speaking) are her least healthy ; her greatest 
longevities are those of healthy serenity. Supposing 
the earth to be animated (as some have thought it), we 
cannot conceive it to be unhappy, rolling, as it has done 
for ages, round the sun, with a swiftness like the blood 
in the veins of childhood. Eternity of existence is 



216 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

inconceivable on any ground of analogy, except as 
identical with healthy prevalence ; and healthy pre- 
valence, with sensation, is inconceivable apart from 
sensations of pleasure. 

Gone long ago are the bad Sicilian Vespers ; but the 
good Sicilian Vespers, the beautiful Sicilian music, the 
beautiful Sicilian poetry, these remain; and, as if in 
sweet scorn of the catastrophe, they are particularly 
famous for their gentleness. To be told that a Sicilian 
air is about to be sung, is to be prepared to hear some- 
thing especially sweet and soft. Every Protestant as 
well as Eoman Catholic lover of music knows the 
Sicilian Mariner's Hymn ; and is a Catholic, if not a 
Roman worshipper, while he sings it. Fancy it rising 
at a distance out of the white-sailed boat in the darkling 
blue waters, when the sun has just gone down, and the 
rock on the woody promontory above the chapel, whose 
bell gave the notice, is touched with rose-colour. Nay, 
fancy you forget all this, and think only of the honest 
simple mariners singing this hymn, at the moment 
when their wives and children are repeating the spirit 
of it on shore, and all Italy is doing the same : 

sanctissinia, purissima, 

Dulcis Virgo Maria ! 
Mater amata, intemerata, 

Ora pro nobis ! 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, RELIGION, AND MODERN POETRY. 217 

most holy, most spotless, 

Mary, Virgin glorious ! 
Mother dearest, maiden clearest — 

Oh, we pray thee, pray for us. 

The sweetest of English poets could not resist 
echoing this kind of evening music in a strain of his 
own ; hut though he did it in the course of an invoca- 
tion, it is rather a description than a prayer. It is, 
how r ever, very Sicilian : — 

INVOCATION. 

Sung behind the scenes in Coleridge's tragedy of "Remorse ;" 

to be accompanied, says the poet, by " soft music from an 

instrument of glass or steel." 

Hear, sweet spirit — hear the spell ! 
Lest a blacker charm compel ; 
So shall the midnight breezes swell 
With thy deep long -lingering hull ; 

(Observe the various yet hell-like intonation of that 
last verse, and the analogous feeling in the repetition of 
the rhyme) 

And at evening evermore, 

In a chapel on the shore, 

Shall the chanters, sad and saintly, 

Yellow tapers burning faintly, 

Doleful masses chant for thee, 

Miserere. Domine I 



218 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Hark ! the cadence dies away 

On the yellow moonlight sea : 
The boatmen rest their oars, and say, 

Miserere, Domine ! 

The tapers are yellow in the chapel, and the moon- 
light yellow out of doors — one of those sympathies of 
colour which are often finer than contrast. 

Coleridge was so fond of sweet sounds, that he makes 
one of the characters in this play exclaim, — 

If the bad spirit retain 'd his angel's voice, 
Hell scarce were hell. 

The Pagans of old were of the same opinion, for 
they made Pluto break his inexorable laws at the sound 
of the harp of Orpheus, his eyes, in spite of themselves, 
being forced to shed " iron tears," as Milton finely calls 
them. The notes, as the poet says, 

Drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek, 
And made Hell grant what Love did seek. 

" The grim king of the ghosts " would not have 
shed them if he could have helped it. So Moschus, in 
his Elegy on the Death of Bion, expresses his opinion, 
that if his deceased friend would sing a pastoral to the 
Queen of Pluto, " something Sicilian,'" as he emphati- 
cally calls it (St/ceXtK-ov ri), she could not have the 
heart to deny his return to earth. One should like to 
know the hymns which the Pagans actually sung to 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, RELIGION, AND MODERN POETRY. 219 

Proserpina and her mother Ceres, and how far they 
coincided, perhaps in some instances were identical, 
with strains now sung in the Catholic churches. Some 
of the oldest chants are supposed to be of Greek origin ; 
and indeed it would be marvellous if all the ancient 
music had been swept away, considering how many 
ceremonies, vestments, odours, processions, churches 
themselves, and, to say the truth, opinions, were 
retained by the new creed from the old — wisely in 
many instances, most curiously in all. Very naturally, 
too ; for the knees are the same knees with which all 
human beings kneel, Pagan or Christian ; and the sky 
is the same to which they look up, whether inhabited 
by saints or goddesses. Nor is there anything 
"blasphemous" (as zealous Protestants are too quick 
to assert) in the Eoman Catholic tendency to use the 
same kind of language towards the one, as was held and 
hymned towards the other; for blasphemy signifies 
what is injurious to the character of the divinity, and 
nothing is injurious to it except the attribution of 
injustice and cruelty. If theological opinions, of what- 
ever creed, offended in nothing worse than an excess of 
zeal towards the beauty of the maternal character, or in 
behalf of the supposition that the spirits of the good 
and pious interested themselves in our welfare, the 
human heart would be little disposed to quarrel with 



220 A JAR OF HONEY FHOM MOUNT HYBLA. 

them, in times even more enlightened than the present. 

There is a couplet extant in Italy, remarkable for being 

both Italian and Latin. It might have been addressed, 

by a Pagan of the Lower Roman Empire, to the goddess 

Proserpina, when she was the guardian angel of Sicily, 

or to the Virgin Mary, by a modern Roman Catholic ; 

and we find nothing horrible in this. On the contrary, 

it seems to fuse the two eras gently and tenderly 

together, by the same affecting link of human want and 

natural devotion. This is the couplet : — 

In mare irato, in subita procella, 
Invoco te, nostra benigna stella. 

In sudden storms, and when the billows blind, 
Thee I invoke, star sweet to human kind ! 

"When we spoke, in a former chapter, of the 
beautiful Sicilian story of Proserpina, we forgot (a very 
ungrateful piece of forgetfulness) to add, that one of the 
loveliest tributes ever paid to it by genius, is the 
Ratio cli Proserpina — Winter's opera so called. There 
is every charm of the subject in it,— the awfulness of 
the greater gods, the genial maternity of Ceres, the 
tender memory of her daughter, the cordial re-assurances 
given her by Mercury, the golden-age dances of the 
shepherds. What smile of encouragement ever sur- 
passed that of the strain on the words Cerere tornera, 
in the divine trio, Mi lasci, madre amata ? What 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, RELIGION, AND MODERN POETRY. 221 

passionate mixture of delight and melancholy, the 
world-famous duet of Vaghi colli ? Why does not 
some publisher make an Elegant Extracts of such music 
from composers that will survive all fashion, and have 
comments written upon them, like those on poets ? 
What would we not give to see such an edition of the 
finest airs of all the great inventive melodists, the 
Pergoleses and Paisiellos and their satellites, and all the 
inventive harmonists too, the Bachs, Corellis, and 
Beethovens, each with variorum notes from the best 
critics, and loving indications of the beauties of 
particular passages ? Publications of this kind are yet 
wanting, to the honour, and glory, and thorough house- 
hold companionship of the art of music : and it is a pity 
somebody does not take the opportunity of setting about 
them, when there are critics, both in and out of the 
profession, qualified to do them justice. * 

We cannot close our Jar better than with a taste of 
" the modern Theocritus," Giovanni Meli, who deserves 
his title, and whose very name, as we said before, 
signifies honey. Meli is honey, both in modern 
Sicilian and in ancient Greek ; and the poet may be a 

* Why does not Mr. Edward Holmes do it ? or Mr. Chorley ? 
"We have heard that M. Berlioz has some such work in hand, with a 
translation of which his friends are to favour the public. Such a pro- 
duction, if copious, might form an epoch in the critical history of the 
art. We hope a time will come when music will be as freely quoted in 
books as poetry is. 



222 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

descendant of the Greek possessors of the island ; nay, 
(to carry the fancy out,) possibly of Theocritus himself ! 
Who is to prove, on the beautiful negative principle, 
that he was not ? 

Meli was an abbate at Palermo, a doctor of medicine, 
public professor of chemistry in the University there, 
and member of several academies. So are his titles set 
forth in the edition of his poems in seven volumes, 
which we have had the pleasure, since these chapters 
were first written, of picking up at a book-stall in 
Holborn. They are not very pastoral-sounding titles ; 
yet the more knowledge the better, even for the 
shepherd ; and the shepherd-poet turns it all to 
account, just as chemistry itself improves the field and 
the flowers. One of the friends whom Theocritus 
himself has immortalized, was a physician. We have it 
on the authority of a gentleman who knew the Abbate 
Meli, that he was as good a man as he was a charming 
poet. He seemed to live only (he says) to do good 
and to give pleasure : and he was as much beloved by 
the poor, as his company was in request among the 
prosperous. To say that Meli was to be of the party, 
was to give an evening assembly of friends its highest 
zest. His virtues were anything but narrow, He was 
temperate, but not ascetic. He balked no genial 
inspiration ; was a modern Anacreon as well as 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, EELIGION, AND MODEEN POETEY. 223 

Theocritus ; evinced a liberal turn of mind in every 

respect, without offence ; and could write hymns full of 

natural piety, as well as drinking and love songs. He 

was also a deeply read man, and a solid thinker. One 

of his longest poems is a banter upon the various 

assumptions of philosophy respecting the system of the 

world. Heartily do we wish it were in our power to 

give as good an account of the poems as of their titles ; 

but though they have a glossary for the benefit of " the 

Italians," we cannot yet boast such a knowledge of them 

as qualifies us to say much in evidence, beyond their 

general merits. These we can discern well enough, 

like glimmerings of nymphs and flocks among the 

trees ; and very like Theocritus indeed is his genius ; 

very true to nature and to manners, impulsive in its 

style, not afraid of colloquialisms and homely traits, but 

with an air of grace over all, and the right happy aroma 

of the subtle and the suggestive. The moment you 

open his first eclogue, you meet with a picture truly 

Theocritan. A herdsman asks a shepherdess if she has 

seen a cow of his which is missing, and he thus accosts 

her :— 

Pastureclcla, di li trizzi ad unna, 
Chi fai pmnata di la manu manca, 
Pri' un t' appighiari ssa facciuzza biunna. 

" shepherdess with the waving locks, who make a 



224 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

penthouse over your eyes with your left hand, for fear of 
embrowning your pretty face," &c. 

Meli was poor, till, doubtless, he thought himself 
rich on receiving a small pension from the late King 
Ferdinand ; for which (says the author of an interesting 
article on the " Dialects and Literature of Southern 
Italy," in the British Quarterly 'Review) " the poet 
expressed his gratitude in respectful, but not adulatory 
terms." 

The dialect of Sicily is remarkable for preferring 
close sounds to broad ones. It converts the Tuscan Z's 
into d's, and its e's and o's into i's and w's. Thus, 
" bella" becomes bedda; " padre, "patri; " mare," marl ; 
" sono," sunnu ; " colorito," culuritu, &c. This is 
reversing the state of things in the days of Theocritus, 
when the Dorian inhabitants of Sicily were accused of 
doing nothing when they spoke but " yawn " and 
"gabble."* But it is attributed to the Arabs, when 
they were masters of the island. It has, probably, been 
injurious to the cause of music, and hindered the 
Sicilians from producing as many fine composers as 
their Neapolitan neighbours. Thus much, lest the 
reader should start at the strange, though pretty, look of 
Meli's Italian, the poet having wisely chosen to speak in 

* See a pleasant allusion to this charge by Theocritus himself, at 
page 84 of the present book, where Praxinoe disburses a quantity of a's. 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, KELIGION, AND MODERN POETRY. 225 

the tongue of those, from whose natures and homes he 
copied. 

The reader will see at once this leading difference 
between the Italian language and the Sicilian form of it, 
in the following opening stanzas of one of Meli's 
canzonets, accompanied by a Tuscan version from the 
pen of Professor Kosini :— 

Sti silenzii, sta virdura, Questa ombrifera verdura, 
Sti muntagni, sti vallati, Queste tacite vallate, 

L'ha criatu la Natura L'ha create la Natura 

Pri li cori innamurati. Sol per l'alme innamorate. 

Lu susurru di li frunni, II susurro delle fronde, 

Di li sciumi lu lamentu, Del rio garrulo il lamento, 

L'aria, l'ecu chi rispunni, L'aria, l'eco cbe risponde, 
Tuttu spira sentimentu. Tutto spira sentimento. 

" These quiet and green places, these mountains and 
valleys, were created by Nature on purpose for loving 
hearts. 

" The whispering of the leaves, the murmuring of the 
waters, the falling and rising of the wind — everything inspires 
the innermost feelings." 

So, in the beginning of Eclogue the Second, a 
countryman, who seems fatigued, accosts another who is 
sitting at his door, and asks him whether his dogs are 
gentle, and he may venture to come in. The good 
householder begs him to stand a minute or two on the 
rock- stone, and he will call the dogs off. " Come here, 

15 



226 A JAR OP HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Scamper," says lie, " thumping the ground there ivith 
your tail. Quiet, Wasp, quiet ! Down, Lion ! Now you 
can come in, and rest yourself ; and I hope you'll stop 
and take something. I have a new cheese at your ser- 
vice, and a piping hot loaf, just out of the oven, made of 
capital bread," &c. 

The graphic animation of this exordium, particularly 
the passage we have marked in Italics, is quite in the 
spirit of Theocritus. But we are obliged to stop short 
in it for want of understanding the next sentence. 

Theocritus could satirize a king. In the following 
passage in his Winter Idyll, Meli is perhaps covertly 
sticking his sly pen into a monk. A good old grandsire 
is proposing to have what we should now call a Christmas 
dinner ; and he consults his family as to what shall be 
the principal dish — what meat he shall kill :— 

Ora e hi tempu, 
Ch'unu di li domestici animali 
Mora pri nui ; ma mi dirriti : quali ? 
Lu voi, la vacca, Yasinu, la crapa 
Su stati sempri a parti tuttu l'anmi 
Di li nostri travagghi ; e na gran parti 
Duvemu ad iddi di li nostri beni ; 
Yi pari, cm* sarria riconoscenza 
Digna di nui, na tali ricompenza ? 

Ma lu porcu ? lu porcu e statu chiddu, 
Chi a li travagghi d' autri ed a li nostri 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, RELIGION, AND MODERN POETRY. 227 

E statu un ozziusu spettaturi ; 

Anzi abbusannu di li nostri curi ; 

Mai s' e dignatu scotiri lu ciancu 

Da lu fangusu lettu, a proprii pedi 

Aspittannu lu cibbu, e cu arroganza 

Nui sgrida di 1' insolita tardanza. 

Chistu, chi nun conusci di la vita, 

Chi li suli vantaggi, e all' autri lassa 

Li vuccuni chili amari, coniu tutti 

Fussimu nati pri li soi piaciri ; 

Chi immersu tra la vili sua pigrizzia 

Stirannusi da 1' unu e 1' autru latu 

Di li suduri d' autru s' e ingrassatu ; 

Si : chistu mora, e ingrassi a nui : lu porcu, 

Lu vili, lu putruni — 

Si : l'ingrassatu a costu d' autru, mora. 

Lettu gia lu prucessu ; e proferuta, 
Fra lu comuni applausu e la gioja, 
La fatali sintenza ; attapanciatu, 
Strascinatu, attacatu, stramazzatu 
Fu lu porcu a V istanti ; un gran cuteddu 
Sprofundannusi dintra di la gula, 
Ci ricerca lu cori, e ci disciogghi 
Lu gruppu di la vita : orrendi grida, 
Gemiti strepitusi, aria ed oricchi 
Sfardanu e a li vicini, e a li luntani, 
Ed anchi fannu sentiri a li stiddi 
La grata nova di lu gran maceddu. 
Saziu gia di la straggi lu cuteddu 
Apri niscennu, spaziusa strata 
A lu sangu, ed a 1' anima purcina : 
L' unu cadennu dintra lu tineddu, 
Prometti sangunazzi ; e F autra scappa, 
E si disperdi in aria tra li venti, 



228 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

com' e fania, passa ad abitari 
Dintru lu corpu di un riccuni avaru, 
Giacchi nun potti in terra ritruvari 
Chiu vili e schiufusu munnizzaru. 

" The bull, cow, donkey, and goat have all shared in 
the labours of the year, and assisted to keep us ; so that 
to slaughter one of those would hardly be grateful. But 
the pig ! What think you of the pig ? He has been 
nothing but a lazy spectator — a fellow living on those 
labours; nay, an abuser of the care we take to keep 
him ; for he scorns to stir from his muddy bed, expects 
his food to be laid at his feet, and even has the arro- 
gance to cry out against us if we are not in a hurry. 
Nothing of life knows he but its luxuries ; he leaves all 
his cares to us, as if we were born for nothing else but 
to heap him with enjoyments. Plunged in the vilest 
indolence, he contents himself with turning from one 
side to the other, and growing fat with the sweat of our 
brows. Oh, he must die by all means, and fatten us in 
our turn. The hog — the vile wretch — the poltroon — the 
corpulent selfish rascal — Death to him ! 

"No sooner said than done. The sentence is carried 
by acclamation. The pig is grappled with, dragged 
along, tied and bound, slain utterly, through and through. 
The huge knife, profoundly plunged into that gullet of 
his, goes to his heart amid horrid shrieks and dinning 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, KELIGI0N, AND MODEBN POETKY. 229 

lamentations, which bear the news of the great deed to 
friends afar off, and to the very stars in heaven. Blood 
and soul, in a flood ample as the way made for them, 
follow the withdrawing blade, — Vanima purcina, the 
spirit of pork ; the blood into a hogshead, promising 
black puddings ; the soul, either into the passing winds, 
or, as others think, into the body of some greedy chuff 
of a millionnaire, that vilest and most repulsive of muck- 
worms." 

Meli's first volume consists entirely of bucolics ; the 
second of odes, sonnets, and canzonets ; the third chiefly 
of verses in the manner of Berni, of satires, and dithy- 
rambics ; the fourth is occupied with a long Bernesque 
poem, called the Fairy Galanta, seemingly full of 
national as well as critical matters ; the fifth and sixth 
with another on Don Quixote; and the seventh with 
elegies and fables. By this the reader may judge of the 
diversity of his genius, and its tendency to the sprightly ; 
with which, however, a fund of thinking is always mixed 
up. He was evidently forced to conceal a great deal of 
deep thought and indignant sympathy in the garb of a 
jester. He did this, however, so well, expressed so 
much horror at the French revolution, and showed him- 
self such a friend of all who had anything good in them, 
that in a country notorious for its arbitrary government, 
he was in favour with the court and aristocracy ; and 



230 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

the circumstance, upon the whole, does them credit. 
Princes in Sicily are as common as country squires in 
England ; but they have beautiful titles, and it is 
pleasant to read the list of his subscribers. Among 
them, here and there, is the name of an Englishman 
ludicrously set forth. Thus we have Sua Altezza Reale, 
&c, to wit : — 

His Koyal Highness Prince Don Leopoldo Borbone — A hundred 

copies. 
His Excellency the Signor Prince della Trabia — Ten copies. 
Her Excellency the Signora Princess della Trabia. 
The Most Illustrious Signor Marquis Cardillo — A hundred 

copies. 
Mister Becker (probably Baker) — Two copies. 
My Lord the Great Chamberlain Don Gasparo Leone. 
The Most Illustrious Signor Duke di Canipobello. 
Don Francesco Orlando. 
Don Antonino Sirretta. 

Don Giuseppe Benthilley (probably Mr. Joseph Bentley). 
Don Giuseppe BornaDO. 
Lieutenant-Colonel Don Filippo Cellano. 
The Most Illustrious Marquis della Gran Montagna. 
Don Antonino Lucchese Pepoli. 
Her Excellency the Signora Princess of Pandolfina. (What a 

noble word !) 
The Most Illustrious Marquis of Altavilla. 
Her Excellency the Signora Princess of Paterno. 
Her Excellency the Signora Duchess della Grazia. 
Don Michele Beaumont. 
His Excellency the Beverend Lord Gravina, Bishop of 

Flaviopolis. 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, RELIGION, AND MODERN POETRY. 231 

The Most Illustrious Count Don Giuseppe de Monroy, of the 

Princes of Pandolfina. 
His Excellency the Signor Prince of Villafranca. 
The Most Illustrious Prince of Yilladorata. 
The most Illustrious Don Yincenzo Jacona di Catania, Baron 

of Castellana. 



But we shall never have done playing this beautiful tune 
of a nomenclature. 

The most agreeable specimen of Meli remains to be 
given. It is done to our band by the reviewer before 
mentioned ; and is done so well, that we are spared the 
difficulty of attempting it after him. We therefore 
give it in his own prose version. It luckily happens 
to be one that furnishes direct comparison with Meli's 
prototype, and with the Latin and English followers of 
that original. Most readers of Pope will recollect a 
passage in which he describes a coquettish girl, who 
attracts her lover's attention while pretending not to do 
so. But see how the natural thoughts originally suggested 
by Theocritus are subjected to the artificial manner. 
The principal idea you have, is not of the things, but of 
the words, and of their classical construction : — 

Steephon. Me gentle Delia beckons from the plain, 

Then, hid in shades, eludes her eager swain ; 
But feigns a laugh, to see me search around, 
And by that laugh the willing fair is found. 



232 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

Daphnis. The sprightly Sylvia trips along the green : 

She runs, but hopes she does not run unseen : 
While a kind glance at her pursuer flies, 
How much at variance are her feet and eyes ! 
— Pope's Pastorals. 

Very epigrammatic that, and as unlike pastoral as 
the ball-rooms could desire ! It was a horrible spoiling 
of Virgil : — 

Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella, 
Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri. 

—Eclog. iii. v. 64. 

Thus translated by Dryden : — 

My Phillis me with pelted apples plies ; 
Then tripping to the woods the wanton hies, 
And wishes to be seen before she flies. 

The Latin poet, too, in the flight of the damsel, 
added a charming idea to the one suggested by Theo- 
critus ; if, indeed, the Greek did not give the first hint 
of it himself — 

BdXXei Kai /xaXoiai rbv a'nrokov a TLXidpiUTa, 
Tag alyag 7rapsXevvra, /cat adv n TromrvXidodti. 

—Idyll v., v. 88. 

Literally, " Clearista pelts the goatherd with apples, as 
he goes by with his goats, and then hums something 
sweet." 

The goatherd here does not seem to stop. It is not 
certain that he and the damsel are acquainted ; though 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, RELIGION, AND MODERN POETRY. 233 

lie wishes to imply that she loves him. In case they 
are intimate, we are to suppose that she intends him to 
imagine her saying something very pleasant, though he 
is too far off to hear it ; hut in the other case, Virgil 
probably understood her to pretend that she had not 
pelted the apples at all ; for which reason she falls to 
humming a tune, with an air of innocent indifference. 

Be this as it may, nobody will deny the truly natural 
and Theocritan style in which the modern Sicilian has 
enlarged upon the old suggestion. 

"Meli," says the reviewer, "introduces a group of 
fishing-girls, chattering and joking, and telling of their 
loves, in the absence of their parents. Their very names, 
Pidda, Lidda, and Ridda, sound congenial to their con- 
dition. To an invitation to go and romp on the sands, 
Lidda prudishly replies that she is afraid of meeting 
some rude swain. Ridda also tells a story of having 
seen a fisherman concealed behind the rocks, who 
addresses her in an amorous song, which frightened 
her out of her senses. But Pidda, who is the eldest of 
the three, loses patience at this affected simplicity, and 
exclaims— 

Eh via — muzzica cca stu jiditeddu ; 

E vaja franca, ca nni canuscemu ; 
Avemu tutti lu 'nnamurateddu.' 

Literally, — f Come, poor innocents, bite my little finger; 



234 A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA. 

but let that pass ; we know each other, and that each 
of us has her sweetheart.' 

" Lidda, at last, casts off her shyness, and sings the 
following pretty ditty— 

Quannu a Culicchia jeu vogghiu parrari, 

Ca spissu spissu mi veni hi sfilu, 
A la finestra mi mettu a filari ; 

Quann' iddu passa, poi rumpu In nlu ; 
Cadi lu fusu ; ed en mettu a gridari, 

* Gnuri, pri carita proitimilu.' 
Iddu lu pigghia ; mi metti a guardari ; 

Jeu mi nni vaju suppilu suppilu. 

" When I wish to speak to my sweetheart, which occurs 
pretty often, I seat myself at the window to spin ; and when 
he is passing underneath, I manage to break the thread ; the 
spindle falls (out of the window), and I cry out, dolefully, 
' Oh, friend, be. so kind as to pick it up for me! ' He does 
so, and looks at me, when I feel out of my wits for joy." 

We shall not close our Jar with anything less good 
than this. There are still, indeed, divers good things 
of ancient Sicilian poetry — one or two in particular — 
which we are wrong not to have given the English 
reader some taste of (as far as we could), while writing 
our chapters on them ; and also some passages from 
modern travellers, which, as illustrating other points 
of our subject, we think would have been found welcome 



SICILY, ITS MUSIC, RELIGION, AND MODERN POETRY. 235 

by the reader. These, therefore, we have put by them- 
selves in the following pages, under a title which shows 
them to have been part of our stock ; and so, sub- 
mitting them to his judgment, conclude by wishing 
both him and his all the good things in the world. 




( 237 ) 



OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 



THE JOURNEY TO THE FEAST. 
(fkom theockitus.) 

This, instead of an " overflowing," ought to have heen 
a constituent part of the Jar, because it supplies what 
has been wanting to complete our specimens of Theo- 
critus ; namely, a sample of the happiest and most 
enjoying portion of his genius. The original is one of 
his finest productions. The chief part of it relates what 
befell him on his way to a friend's house out of town, to 
join a party at harvest-home. He overtakes a brother 
poet, who, in respect to his condition in life, might have 
been to Theocritus what a Burns from the plough might 
have been to a "gentleman," had any such rival poet 
existed in Burns' time. This inspired rustic, who (with 
the propriety noticed in our remarks on the subject) 
speaks as well as the gentleman himself, is represented 
as reciting a poem of his composition, to beguile the 



238 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 

way. Theocritus, in return, recites a composition of 
his own ; and the whole piece concludes with a descrip- 
tion of the luxurious orchard nest which awaited our 
author on his arrival at the house he was going to : — 

Once on a time myself and Eucritus 

"Went out of town, taking Amyntas with us, 

To join a feast of Ceres, that was given 

By Phrasidamus and Antigenes, 

Sons of Lycopeus, and descended too 

(If that is anything) from Clitias, 

Ay, and from Calcon, who with his strong foot 

Dug from the rock the fount there, at Burinna, 

"Where you perceive such a thick hower of elms 

And poplars, making quite a roof o'erhead. 

"We had not got half way, nor yet discern'd 

The tomb of Brasilas, when we overtook, 

Travelling along, a favourite of the Muse, — 

A goatherd, of the name of Lycidas ; 

And goatherd well he seem'd ; for on his shoulders 

Hung a right simple goatskin, hairy and thick, 

Smelling as if 'twas new ; about his body 

Was an old jerkin, tied with platted straw ; 

And in his hand he bore a crooked stick 

Made of wild olive. Placidly he turned, 

A little smile parting his kindly lips, 

And with a genial eye accosting me, 

Said, "Ah, Theocritus ! and where go you 

At noon, when all the lizards are asleep, 

And not a lark but sobers. Is't a feast 

You're making haste to, or some vintager's, 

That thus you dash the pebbles with your sandals ? " 



THE JOUENEY TO THE FEAST. 239 

" Lycidas," answered I, " the world, my friend, 
Shepherds, reapers, and all, count you a poet 
Of the first pastoral order, — which delights me : 
Nevertheless, I hope you see another. 
It is a feast we're going to. Some friends 
Keep one to-day to holy Mother Earth, 
For gratitude, their garners are so full. 
But come ; — as we are going the same way, 
And love the same good pastime, let's indulge 
Each other's vein a little ; for my lips 
Breathe also of the Muse ; and people call me 
Greatest of living song ; — a praise, however, 
Of which I am not credulous, — no, by Earth ; 
For there's Philetas, and our Samian too, 
Whom I no more pretend to have surpass'd, 
Than frogs the grasshoppers." 

Well ; — we agreed ; 
And Lycidas, with one of his sweet smiles, 
Said, " You must let me give you, when we finish, 
This olive-stick, for you have proved yourself 
A scion truly from the stock of Jove. 
I also hate the builder that pretends 
To rival mountain-tops, and just as much 
Those dunghill cocks that tear their throats in vain 
With trying to outcrow Homer himself ! 
But come, let us begin, Theocritus. — 
Well,— I'll be first then. Tell me if you like 
This little piece, friend, which I hammered out 
The other day as I was pacing JEtna. 

Lycidas here commences his recitation of the fol- 
lowing verses, which are in honour of a friend who has 
gone abroad, and include the Legend of Comatas : — 



240 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 

" Ageanax, if lie forgets me not 

His faithful friend, shall safely cross the seas 

To Mitylene, both when the south wind, 

Warned by the westering Kids,* adds wet to wet, 

And when Orion dips his sparkling feet. 

Let halcyons smooth the billows, and make still 

The west wind and the fiercer east, which stirs 

The lowest sea-weeds ; — halcyons, of all birds 

Dear to the blue-eyed Nymphs, and fed by them. 

Let all things favour the kind voyager, 

And land him safely ; — and that day, will I, 

Wearing a crown of roses or white violets, 

Quaff by my fireside Pteleatic wine ; 

And some one shall dress beans ; and I will have 

A noble couch, to lie at ease upon, 

Heaped up of asphodel and yielding herbs ; 

And there I'll drink in a divine repose, 

Calling to mind Ageanax, and drain 

With clinging lips the goblet to the dregs : 

And there shall be two shepherds to play to me 

Upon the pipe ; and Tityrus, standing by, 

Shall sing how Daphnis was in love with Xenia, 

And used to walk the Mountain, while the oaks 

Moaned to him on the banks of Himera ; 

And how he melted in his love away, 

Like snows on Athos, or on Ehodope, 

Or Hasmus, or the farthest Caucasus ; — 

And Tityrus shall sing also, how of old 

The goatherd by his cruel lord was bound, 

And left to die in a great chest ; and how 

The busy bees, up coming from the meadows 

To the sweet cedar, fed him with soft flowers, 

Because the Muse had filled his mouth with nectar, 

* The constellation so called. 



THE JOURNEY TO THE FEAST. 241 

Yes, all those sweets were thine, blessed Comatas ; 
And thou wast put into the chest, and fed 
By the blithe bees, and passed a pleasant time. 
"Would that in my time also thou wert living, 
That we might keep our flocks upon the Mountain, 
And I might hear thy voice, while thou shouldst lie 
Under the oak-trees or the pines, and modulate 
Thy pipe deliciously, divine Comatas." 

Here ended he his song, and thus in turn 

I took up mine : — " Dear Lycidas, the Nymphs 

Have taught me also, while I kept my flocks, 

Excellent subjects ; and the best of all 

I'll tell you now, since you are dear to them." 

Theocritus here commences his recitation in turn, 
the subject of which is an unsuccessful passion of his 
friend Aratus, supposed to be the contemporary poet of 
that name, author of the Phenomena : — 

" — 'Twas on the unlucky side the Loves sneezed to me, 

For I love Myrto, as the goats love spring, 

But to no purpose. Meanwhile too, Aratus, 

My best of friends, becomes in love with Pholoe. 

Aristis has long known it, — good Aristis, 

To whom Apollo's self would not disdain 

To play his harp from his own golden seat. — 

Pan, who gained by lot the lovely grounds 

Of Homole, — Oh, send her to his arms, 

Her, or another girl as beautiful ! 

Oh, do but so, and the Arcadian youth 

Shall scourge thee not with squills, when they have miss'd 

Their hunted game : — but if thou dost it not, 

Thou shalt be flayed, and sent to sleep in straw : 

In mountains and by rivers of the north 

16 



242 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 

Mid winter shalt thou pass ; and then in summer 

Be changed to utmost ^Ethiopia, there 

To tend thy flocks under the Blemyan rock, 

Where thou canst see not Nile.* — But you, ye Loves, 

With your sweet apple cheeks, leave the moist nooks 

Of Hyetis and Byblis and fly up 

To Venus's own heaven, and thence, ah thence, 

Shoot with your arrows for me this desir'd one, 

Shoot, — since she pities not my friend and guest. 

Biper is she than the moist pear ; and yet 

The women say to her, ' Alas, alas, 

Your flower will wither, Pholoe, on the stalk ! ' 

Come then, Aratus ; let us lie no more 

At these proud doors, nor wear our feet with journeys ; 

But let another, if he chooses, start 

With sleepless eyes to hear the crowing cock ; 

And leave such labours to the wrestler Molon. 

Care we for nought but comfort : let us seek 

Some ancient dame, who, muttering o'er a charm, 

Shall keep away from us all things unkindly." 

I ended ; and with one of his old smiles, 
He gave me his poetic gift, the olive-stick ; 
And turning to the left, struck off for Pyxa. 
We then went on to Phrasidamus's, — 
Eucritus, I, and the good little Amyntas, — 
And gladly rested upon deep thick couches 
Of lentisk, and of vine -leaves freshly cut. 
Above our heads a throng of elms and poplars 
Kept stirring ; and from out a cave o' the Nymphs 
A sacred runnel, pouring forth, ran gurgling. 

* This sample, strange as it may appear, of the familiarity which 
breeds contempt, even towards objects of worship, and which Theocritus 
must have smiled while he was describing, has not been confined to 

Paganism. 



ELEGY ON THE DEATH Of BION. 243 

Hot in the greenest leaves, labour'd away 

Those chatterers the cicadas ; the sad tree-frog 

Kept his good distance in the thorny bush ; 

The larks and linnets sang ; the stock-dove mourned ; 

And round the fountain spun the yellow bees : 

All things smelt rich of summer, rich of autumn : 

Pears were about our feet, and by our side 

Apples on apples roll'd ; the boughs bent down 

To the very earth with loads of damson plums ; 

And from the casks of wine of four years old, 

We broke the corking pitch. — ye who keep 

Parnassus' top, ye Nymphs of Castaly, 

Did ever Chiron, in the rocky cave 

Of Pholos, set such goblets before Hercules ? 

Did ever that old shepherd of Anapus, 

Great Polyphemus, who could throw the rocks, 

Compose such nectar to go dance withal, — 

As on that day ye broached for us, Nymphs, 

Before the altar of Earth's generous Mother ? 

Oh, may I riot in her heaps again 

With a great winnow ; while she stands and smiles, 

Holding, in either hand, poppies and wheat. 



ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF BION. 
(from moschus.) 

The chief characteristic both of this Sicilian poet 
Moschus and his friend Bion was a tender and elegant 
sweetness. We have endeavoured to modulate our 
version accordingly. 



244 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 

This is the pastoral poetry of books, as distinguished 
from that of real life ; yet it has a real echo in the 
minds of those who can pass from one region to the 
other; nor is it wanting in some touches exquisitely 
human, as we have seen in the famous passage already 
quoted from the Elegy respecting the (supposed) dif- 
ference between the transitory nature of man and the 
rejuvenescence of flowers : — 

Moan with me, moan, ye woods and Dorian waters, 

And weep, ye rivers, the delightful Bion ; 

Ye plants, now stand in tears ; murmur, ye groves ; 

Ye flowers, sigh forth your odours with sad buds ; 

Flush deep, ye roses and anemones ; 

And more than ever now, hyacinth, show 

Your written sorrows ;* — the sweet singer's dead. 

Raise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 

Ye nightingales, that mourn in the thick leaves, 

Tell the Sicilian streams of Arethuse, 

Bion the shepherd's dead ; and that with him 

Melody's dead, and gone the Dorian song. 

Raise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 
Weep on the waters, ye Strymonian swans, 
And utter forth a melancholy song, 
Tender as his whose voice was like your own ; 
And say to the (Eagrian girls, and say 
To all the nymphs haunting in Bistony, 
The Doric Orpheus is departed from us. 

* Alluding to the letters AI, which simply signifies " Alas," and 
which are to he found (so to speak) in the dark lines or specks observ- 
able in the petals of the Turk's-cap Lily ; which Professor Martyn has 
shown to be the true hyacinth of the ancients. 



ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF BION. 245 

Kaise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 
No longer pipes lie to the charmed herds, 
No longer sits under the lonely oaks, 
And sings ; but to the ears of Pluto now 
Tunes his Lethean verse ; and so the hills 
Are voiceless ; and the cows that follow still 
Beside the bulls, low and will not be fed. 

Eaise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 
Apollo, Bion, wept thy sudden fate : 
The Satyrs too, and the Priapuses 
Dark- veiled, and for that song of thine the Pans, 
Groan'd ; and the fountain-nymphs within the woods 
Mourn' d for thee, melting into tearful waters ; 
Echo too mourn' d among the rocks that she 
Must hush — and imitate thy lips no longer ; 
Trees and the flowers put off their loveliness ; 
Milk flows not as 'twas used ; and in the hive 
The honey moulders, — for there is no need, 
Now that thy honey's gone, to look for more. 

Raise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 

Not so the dolphins mourn'd by the salt sea, 

Not so the nightingale among the rocks, 

Not so the swallow over the far downs, 

Not so Ceyx called for his Halcyone, 

Not so in the eastern valleys Memnon's bird 

Scream'd o'er his sepulchre for the Morning's son, 

As all have mourned for the departed Bion. 

Raise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 

Ye nightingales and swallows every one 

Whom he once charm'd and taught to sing at will, 

Plain to each other midst the green tree boughs, 

With other birds o'erhead. Mourn too, ye doves. 



246 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. . 

Raise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 
Who now shall play thy pipe, most desir'd one ! 
Who lay his lip against thy reeds ? who dare it ? 
For still they breathe of thee and of thy mouth, 
And Echo comes to seek her voices there. 
Pan's be they ; and ev'n he shall fear perhaps 
To sound them, lest he be not first hereafter. 

Raise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 
And Galatea weeps, who loved to hear thee, 
Sitting beside thee on the calm sea- shore ; 
For thou didst play far better than the Cyclops, 
And him the fair one shunn'd : but thee, but thee, 
She used to look at sweetly from the water. 
But now forgetful of the deep, she sits 
On the lone sands, and feeds thy herd for thee. 

Raise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 

The Muse's gifts all died with thee, shepherd, 

Men's admiration, and sweet women's kisses. 

The Loves about thy sepulchre weep sadly, 

For Venus loved thee, much more than the kiss 

With which of late she kiss'd Adonis, dying. 

Thou too, Meles, sweetest- voic'd of rivers, 

Thou too hast undergone a second grief; 

For Homer first, that sweet mouth of Calliope, 

Was taken from thee ; and they say thou mournedst 

For thy great son with many- sobbing streams, 

Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice. 

And now, again, thou weepest for a son, 

Melting away in misery. Both of them 

Were favourites of the fountain-nymphs ; one drank 

The Pegasean fount, and one his cup 

Fill'd out of Arethuse ; the former sang 

The bright Tyndarid lass, and the great son 



ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF BION. 247 

Of Thetis, and Atricles Menelaus ; 

But he, the other, not of wars or tears 

Told us, but intermix'd the pipe he played 

With songs of herds, and as he sung he fed them ; 

And he made pipes, and milk'd the gentle heifer, 

And taught us how to kiss, and cherish'd love 

Within his bosom, and was worthy of Yenus. 

Eaise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 

Every renowned city and every town 

Mourns for thee, Bion ; — Ascra weeps thee more 

Than her own Hesiod ; the Boeotian woods 

Ask not for Pindar so ; nor patriot Lesbos 

For her Alcseus ; nor th' iEgean isle 

Her poet ; nor does Paros so wish back 

Archilochus ; and Mitylene now, 

Instead of Sappho's verses, rings with thine. 

All the sweet pastoral poets weep for thee,— 

Sicelidas the Samian ; Lycidas, 

Who used to look so happy ; and at Cos, 

Philetas ; and at Syracuse, Theocritus ; 

All in their several dialects : and I, 

I too, no stranger to the pastoral song, 

Sing thee a dirge Ausonian, such as thou 

Taughtest thy scholars, honouring us as all 

Heirs of the Dorian Muse. Thou didst bequeath 

Thy store to others, but to me thy song. 

Raise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 
Alas, when mallows in the garden die, 
Green parsley, or the crisp luxuriant dill, 
They live again, and flower another year ; 
But we, how great soe'er, or strong, or wise, 
When once we die, sleep in the senseless earth 



248 OVERFLOWINGS OF TEE JAE. 

A long, an endless, unawakeable sleep. 
Thou too in earth must be laid silently : 
But the nymphs please to let the frog sing on ; 
Nor envy I, for what he sings is worthless. 

Kaise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 
There came, Bion, poison to thy mouth, 
Thou didst feel poison ; how could it approach 
Those lips of thine, and not be tum'd to sweet ! 
Who could be so delightless as to mix it, 
Or bid be mix'd, and turn him from thy song ! 

Eaise, raise the dirge, Muses of Sicily. 

But justice reaches all ; — and thus, meanwhile, 

I weep thy fate. And would I could descend 

Like Orpheus to the shades, or like Ulysses, 

Or Hercules before him : I would go 

To Pluto's house, and see if you sang there, 

And hark to what you sang. Play to Proserpina 

Something Sicilian, some delightful pastoral, 

For she once played on the Sicilian shores, 

The shores of JEtna, and sang Dorian songs, 

And so thou wouldst be honour'd ; and as Orpheus, 

For his sweet harping, had his love again, 

She would restore thee to our mountains, Bion. 

Oh, had I but the power, I, I would do it. 



THE SHIP OF HIERO. 

" We find an ample but interesting description, in Athenaeus, 
of a magnificent and prodigious galley, that had twenty benches 
of rowers, contained an extraordinary number of persons, and 
was not only provided with dreadful means of assault, but with 



THE SHIP OF HIEEO. 249 

all that could delight the mind, and charm the sense. Baths 
of bronze and of Taurominian marble, stables, a gymnasium, 
small gardens planted with various trees and watered by pipes, 
the twining vine and ivy, a library, and a sun-dial, were all in 
this galley. It had three decks ; the second of which was 
inlaid with variegated mosaic - work, containing the whole 
history of Homer's Iliad. Every necessary for repose by night, 
and banqueting by day, was provided with a regal luxury. 

" As much timber was brought from the forest of iEtna, 
for the building of this galley, as would have sufficed for sixty 
ordinary galleys. It had three masts ; and, on the upper deck, 
it was fortified round with a wall, and eight towers like a 
citadel. Each of the towers contained four combatants, com- 
pletely armed, and two archers. Within, the towers were 
provided with missiles and stones, and on the walls stood a 
kind of artillery-machine, invented by Archimedes, which 
threw stones of three hundred-weight, and a lance twelve ells 
in length, to the distance of a stadium, or six hundred feet. 

" Each side of the wall was provided with sixty young 
men, well armed ; and there were shooters even in the mast- 
cages.* Kound the upper deck was an iron rim ; where 
there were machines placed which would act immediately 
against an enemy's ship, hold it fast, and draw it to the galley. 
A tree sufficiently large for the mainmast was long sought 
for in vain, till a hog-driver found one in Brettia, or 
Bruttium, the present South Calabria. The lower deck could 
be pumped by a single man, with the aid of a machine which 
the Greeks called ko%\i'ov, the Latins cochlea, and which we, 
after its inventor, name the screw of Archimedes. 

" When the wonderful work was completed, it was dis- 
covered that some of the havens of Hiero would not contain 
it, and that in others it was not safe. Hiero therefore sent 

* Similar perhaps to the Top, or Round-top, of a man-of-war. — Note 
by the Translator, 



250 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 

the galley to King Ptolemy (Ptolornasus Philadelphia, I sup- 
pose), as a present, to Alexandria. 

" You will pardon me this borrowed but abbreviated 
description, taken from Athenasus, as it appears to me not 
only interesting in itself, but usefully instructive to those who 
have formed no just idea of the mechanics of the ancients. 
To such persons, I recommend the chapter in Athenasus which 
contains this description, as well as others, in which greater 
ships of the Ptolemies are described ; and of one which was 
built by Ptoloinaaus Philopater, that, rowers and warriors 
included, could contain seven thousand men." — Stolberg's 
Travels through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Sicily 
(translated by Holcroft), vol. iv. p. 177. 



SERENADES IN SICILY AND NAPLES. 

" We reached Alcamo in the evening ; a well-builfc town, that 
contains above 8,000 inhabitants. It was built in the year 
828, on the fruitful hill Bonifacio, by the Saracen Adalcamo, 
or Halcamo, who came from Africa ; but its site was removed 
by the Emperor Frederick the Second to the plain in which it 
now stands. 

"Alcamo boasts of having produced famous men; and, 
among others, Ciullo del Camo, who is generally called 
Vincentio di Alcamo. He was the contemporary of Frederick 
the Second, and is supposed by some to be the first who wrote 
poetry in the Italian language ; at least, he was one of the 
first Italian poets. As it was Sunday, we were not surprised 
to see a great part of the inhabitants tumultuously crowding 
the streets, for this is a custom through all Italy. They begin 
on the Saturday evening, after the labour of the week is over, 
to collect in the market-places and streets. He who should be 



SERENADES IN SICILY AND NAPLES. 251 

unacquainted with their manners, would imagine that some 
extraordinary event or insurrection had caused them to 
assemble ; for they usually speak all together, with loud voices, 
rapid articulation, and animated gestures. In the midst of 
their violent contentions, you every moment expect they will 
seize each other by the throat, and are agreeably surprised to 
hear them end in a loud laugh. 

" Thus it was at Alcamo, where the streets seemed to be 
in an uproar till after midnight, when singing and music 
began ; yet, as early as three in the morning, the people were 
going about, crying aloud the bread and meat, which they sold 
to the workmen that were preparing for their labour in the 
fields. The Sicilians, like the Italians, need but little sleep, 
and willingly part with that little for any diversion ; hence the 
custom of serenading ever has and ever will prevail. Horace, 
in the ninth ode of his first book, speaks of the serenades of 
his days. He has been, hitherto, misinterpreted by some 
commentators ; and, although the manners of the south of 
Italy and of Sicily might have pointed out what the poet 
intended to describe, yet I should probably still have misunder- 
stood him, if a lucky accident had not informed me of the true 
meaning of the verse. 

" A volume of the Gazette Litteraire de V Europe fell into 
my hands at Naples, a journal which gave extracts from the 
commentator, Abbate Galiana, a writer who died some years 
ago at Naples, a man of understanding, and famous for his 
numerous works. I do not believe that the whole of his com- 
mentary has yet been made public. 

" The ode of which I am speaking begins — 

' Vides ut alta stet nive candidum 
Soracte.' 

— Horace, 1. i. Od. 9. 

1 Behold Soracte's airy height, 
Made heavy with a weight of snow.' 

— -Francis, 



252 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR, 

" The verses 

' Lenesque sub noctem susurri 
Composita repetantur hora.' 

1 An assignation sweetly made, 
"With gentle whispers in the dark.' 

— Francis. 

have generally been understood as if the poet spoke of social 
friends who met together in the evening. But why should they 
speak in whispers ? And why at an appointed hour ? Is not 
the unexpected visit of a friend often the most pleasant ? 

" Others came nearer to the meaning, without attaining it. 
They supposed the poet had spoken of two lovers conversing 
together. Let us hear our acute Neapolitan. 

" ' These lenes susurri,' says Galiana, ' are not the soft 
whispers of two lovers ; they are serenades. To elucidate my 
meaning, it will be necessary for me to enlarge a little on the 
manners of the ancient Bomans — manners which are still pre- 
served in the lower parts of Italy, Spain, and the East. Love, 
that ever powerful, but ever hypocritical passion, suffers itself 
to be fettered and constrained as long as it can endure ; but 
when it gathers sufficient strength, it breaks its chains and 
recovers its freedom. In Spain and Italy, where the climate 
will permit, the lover declares his passion in the street and at 
the windows. In France and Germany, where the winds are 
more rude, love is obliged to open the door, and tell his tale 
by the fire- side. In the country of Horace, the door was im- 
passable and the house considered as sacred, particularly if it 
contained a young maiden that was marriageable. 

" ' But let us not deceive ourselves : neither Arab nor Turk 
first introduced the jealousy of the seraglio to Greece and Asia. 
The custom is much older ; it is attached to the soil, it still 
exists in Italy, or rather did exist, till, at the end of the last 
century, French manners prevailed all over Italy. In the south, 



SEKENADES IN SICILY AND NAPLES. 253 

however, this ancient custom still remains in full force ; * the 
doors there are yet impassable to lovers. Watched as they are 
in Turkey, the girls spend a great part of their time at the win- 
dow, especially by night, listening to the songs which the lovers 
sing in a low voice, that they may not disturb the neighbour- 
hood. The maiden conceals the light of her chamber, and her 
lover only knows that she is present by her soft whispers which 
he hears from the balcony. I have a thousand times witnessed 
the scenes which Horace describes. On a sudden the girl is 
silent, and returns no more answers to the discourse of her 
lover, who, being in the dark, knows not whether she still listens 
or is gone. He speaks again, again waits to hear, and at last 
receiving no reply, is persuaded that his beloved is retired to 
rest ; or that, frightened by a noise in her mother's chamber, 
she has thrown herself under the bed-clothes and counterfeited 
sleep. 

" ' These accidents of fright are so common that the lover 
is not astonished if he be suddenly left in the middle of his 
nightly colloquy. Dejected, he puts his mandoline in its case, 
and is about to be gone, when, in an instant, his young mistress, 
who had retired to a corner of her chamber, gives a loud laugh 
to inform him that she still listens, and that she had only been 
sportively playing him a trick. Overjoyed, enraptured, he re- 
turns, and again begins his amorous endless tale. 

* " This extreme restraint originates in a mistrust of women, and 
the ill opinion which prevails of the sex. A prudent and chaste 
education honours and ennobles the fair, who are most injuriously 
debased by oriental confinement. The German and English women are 
the most virtuous of their sex. Nowhere are unmarried women so 
innocent, or the married so happy. Nowhere are wives so honoured, 
and so full of worth, as among the Germans and the English. Neither 
have our women that cold reserve which is frequently the lot of an 
Englishwoman. What Galiani says of the hypocrisy of love is in part 
explained by the text, and in part must be understood only of this 
passion in the South." 



254 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 

" ' This agrees with the description of Horace : — 

" Nunc et latentis proditor intimo 

Gratus puellse risus ab angulo : 

Pignusque dereptum lacertis, 

Aut digito male pertinaci." 

" The laugh that from the corner flies, 
The sportive fair one shall betray ; 
Then boldly snatch the joyful prize, 

A ring or bracelet tear away : 
While she, not too severely coy, 
Struggling shall yield the willing toy." 

— Francis. 

" ' In the last two lines, Horace gives us a picture of what 
happens at a house door. In Italy the young girls are permitted 
to step to the door for a moment, especially at the beginning of 
night. The lover is careful to pass and repass, that he may 
catch the instant in which he may remind his mistress of the 
hour of their nightly meetings, press her to observe her promise, 
and endeavour to obtain a token. The last is generally no more 
than a pretext that he may squeeze her hand, and take a ring 
from her finger which is weakly defended.' 

" Thus far Galiana, and I have no difficulty in admitting 
that the two last lines explain what actually happens. The girl 
has played tricks with and laughed at her lover ; and, being in- 
clined to be reconciled, runs down to the house door. She 
quarrels with him only for the pleasure of making it up. Our 
vetturino, a lively young man, who has several times travelled 
over all Sicily, was not so weary by riding in the heat, but that 
he willingly touched the strings of his instrument nightly before 
many a window." — Stolberg's Travels, vol iii. p. 447. 



( 255 ) 



SICILIAN BANDITTI IN THE YEAR 1770. 

" We are just returned from the prince's " (the Prince of 
Villafranca).* " He received us politely, but with a good deal 
of state. He offered us the use of his carriages, as there are 
none to be hired ; and, in the usual style, begged to know in 
what he could be of service to us. We told him (with an apology 
for our abrupt departure) that we were obliged to set off to- 
morrow, and begged his protection on our journey. He replied 
that he would immediately give orders for guards to attend us, 
that should be answerable for everything ; that we need give 
ourselves no further trouble ; that whatever number of mules 
we had occasion for should be ready at the door of the inn, at 
any hour we should think proper to appoint. He added that 
we might entirely rely on these guards, who were people of the 
most determined resolution, as well as of the most approved con- 
fidence, and would not fail to chastise on the spot any person 
that should presume to impose upon us. 

"Now, who do you think these trusty and well-beloved guards 
are composed of ? Why, of the most daring and most hardened 
villains, perhaps, that are to be met with upon earth, who, in any 
other country, would have been broken upon the wheel, or hung in 
chains, but are here publicly protected, and universally feared 
and respected. It was this part of the police of Sicily that I 
was afraid to give you an account of. However, I have now 
conversed with the prince's people on the subject, and they have 
confirmed every circumstance that Mr. Maestre made me ac- 
quainted with. 

" He told me, that in this east part of the island, called Val 
Demoni, from the devils that are supposed to inhabit Mount 
iEtna, it has ever been found altogether impracticable to extirpate 

* Probably the one mentioned in the list of Meli's subscribers. 



256 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAE. 

the banditti ; there being numberless caverns and subterraneous 
passages around that mountain, where no troops could possibly 
pursue them. That, besides, as they are known to be perfectly 
determined and resolute, never failing to take a dreadful revenge 
on all who have offended them, the Prince of Yillafranca has 
embraced it, not only as the safest, but likewise as the wisest 
and most political scheme, to become their declared patron and 
protector. And such of them as think proper to leave their 
mountains and forests, though perhaps only for a time, are sure 
to meet with good encouragement, and a certain protection in 
his service, where they enjoy the most unbounded confidence, 
which, in no instance, they have ever yet been found to make 
an improper or a dishonest use of. They are clothed in the 
prince's livery, yellow and green, with silver lace, and wear like- 
wise a badge of their honourable order, which entitles them to 
universal fear and respect from the people. 

" I have just been interrupted by an upper servant of the 
prince's, who, both by his looks and language, seems to be of 
the same worthy fraternity. He tells us, that he has ordered 
our muleteers, at their peril, to be ready by daybreak ; but that 
we need not go till we think proper : for it is their business to 
attend on nostre eccellenze. He says he has likewise ordered 
two of the most desperate fellows in the whole island to accom- 
pany us ; adding, in a sort of whisper, that we need be under 
no apprehension, for that if any person should presume to im- 
pose upon us a single baiocc,* they would certainly put him 
to death. I gave him an ounce, f which I knew was what he 
expected, on which he redoubled his bows, and his eccellenzas, 
and declared we were the most honorabili Signori he had ever 
met with, and that, if we pleased, he himself should have the 
honour of attending us, and would chastise any person that 
should dare to take the wall of us, or injure us in the most 
minute trifle. We thanked him for his zeal, showing him we 

* A fcrriall coin. f About eleven shillings. 



SICILIAN BANDITTI IN THE YEAR 1770. 257 

had swords of our own. On which, bowing respectfully, he 
retired. 

"I can now, with more assurance, give you some account 
of the conversation I had with Signor Maestre, who seems to 
be a very intelligent man, and has resided here for these great 
many years. 

" He says that in some circumstances these banditti are 
the most respectable people of the island ; and have by much 
the highest and most romantic notions of what they call their 
point of honour. That, however criminal they may be with 
regard to society in general, yet, with respect to one another, 
and to every person to whom they have once professed it, they 
have ever maintained the most unshaken fidelity. The 
magistrates have often been obliged to protect them, and pay 
them court, as they are known to be perfectly determined and 
desperate, and so extremely vindictive, that they will certainly 
put any person to death that has ever given them just cause of 
provocation. On the other hand, it never was known that any 
person who had put himself under their protection, and showed 
that he had confidence in them, had cause to repent of it, or 
was injured by any of them, in the most minute trifle ; but on 
the contrary, they will protect him from impositions of every 
kind, and scorn to go halves with the landlord, like most other 
conductors and travelling servants ; and will defend him with 
their lives, if there is occasion : that those of their number 
who have thus enlisted themselves in the service of society, 
are known and respected by the other banditti all over the 
island ; and the persons of those they accompany are ever 
held sacred. For these reasons, most travellers choose to hire 
a couple of them from town to town ; and may thus travel over 
the whole island in safety. To illustrate their character the 
more, he added two stories, which happened but a few days 
ago, and are still in everybody's mouth. 

" A number of people were found digging in a place where 
some treasure was supposed to have been hid during the 

17 



258 OVEBFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 

plague. As this has been forbid under the most severe 
penalties, they were immediately carried to prison, and 
expected to have been treated without mercy ; but, luckily for 
the others, one of these heroes happened to be of the number. 
He immediately wrote to the Prince of Yillafranca, and made 
use of such powerful arguments in their favour, that they were 
all immediately set at liberty. 

" This will serve to show their consequence with the civil 
power. The other story will give you a strong idea of their 
barbarous ferocity, and the horrid mixture of stubborn vice 
and virtue (if I may call it by that name) that seems to direct 
their actions. I should have mentioned, that they have a 
practice of borrowing money from the country people, who 
never dare refuse them ; and if they promise to pay it, they 
have ever been found punctual and exact, both as to the time 
and the sum; and would much rather rob and murder an 
innocent person, than fail of payment on the day appointed. 
And this they have often been obliged to do, only in order, 
as they say, to fulfil their engagements, and to save their 
honour. 

"It happened within this fortnight that the brother of one 
of these heroic banditti having occasion for money, and not 
knowing how to procure it, determined to make use of his 
brother's name and authority, an artifice which he thought 
could not easily be discovered ; accordingly he went to a 
country priest, and told him his brother had occasion for 
twenty ducats, which he desired he would immediately lend 
him. The priest assured him that he had not so large a sum, 
but that if he would return in a few days it should be ready 
for him. The other replied that he was afraid to return to his 
brother with this answer, and desired that he would by all 
meansjtake care to keep out of his way — at least till such time 
as he had pacified him, otherwise he could not be answerable 
for the consequences. As bad fortune would have it, the very 
next day the priest and the robber met in a narrow road ; the 



SICILIAN BANDITTI IN THE YEAR 1770. 259 

former fell a-trembling as the latter approached, and at last 
dropped on his knees to beg for mercy. The robber, astonished 
at this behaviour, desired to know the cause of it. The 
trembling priest answered, ' II denaro, il denaro. The money 
— the money ; but send your brother to-morrow, and you shall 
have it.' The haughty robber assured him that he disdained 
taking money of a poor priest ; adding, that if any of his 
brothers had been low enough to make such a demand, he 
himself was ready to advance the sum. The priest acquainted 
him with the visit he had received the preceding night from his 
brother, by his order, assuring him, that if he had been master 
of the sum, he should immediately have supplied it. ' Well,' 
says the robber, ' I will now convince you whether my brother 
or I are most to be believed ; you shall go with me to his house, 
which is but a few miles distant.' On their arrival before the 
door the robber called on his brother, who, never suspecting the 
discovery, immediately came to the balcony ; but on perceiving 
the priest he began to make excuses for his conduct. The 
robber told him there was no excuse to be made, that he only 
desired to know the fact, if he had gone to borrow money of 
that priest in his name or not ? On his owning it, the robber 
with deliberate coolness lifted his blunderbuss to his shoulder 
and shot him dead, and turning to the astonished priest, ' You 
will now be persuaded,' said he, ' that I had no intention of 
robbing you at least.' 

" You may now judge how happy we must be in company 
of our guards. I don't know but this very hero may be one 
of them." — Brydone's Tour through Sicily and Malta, vol. i. 
(first edition), p. 67. 



260 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 



GOOD-NATURED HOSPITALITY, AND FACETIOUS IGNORANT 
OLD GENTLEMAN. 

(CHEISTMAS DAY, 1777.) 

" Having spent the best part of the day in examining, measuring, 
and drawing this noble building, I hastened back to Calatafimi, 
as eager for refreshment as I had been in the morning for 
antiquities. I found the best fare provided for me the place 
could afford ; the lodging, however, was old, crazy, and cold, 
but the owners so civil and attentive that it was impossible to 
complain of any inconveniences ; the master of the house was 
a notary, and his wife one of the prettiest women I had yet 
seen in Sicily. I was afterwards distressed beyond measure to 
learn that they had not suffered my man to pay for the least 
thing, and had sitten up all night to accommodate us with beds. 
To enliven the evening conversation they invited the principal 
people of the town with their wives, who were very free and 
sociable ; this rather surprised me, as many travellers, and 
those very modern ones, tell us that the Sicilians are so 
jealous and severe to their wives that they never suffer them 
to come into the company of strangers, much less to join in 
conversation with them. I suspect these persons have copied 
authors who wrote in times when such mistrust reigned more 
than it does at present, or have formed general inductions from 
partial evidence. There seems to be very little constraint laid 
upon the intercourse of the two sexes among the nobility at 
Palermo, and none among my visitors at Calatafimi, people of 
a lower class ; the observation, therefore, does not hold good 
in every instance. The assembly was very attentive to all my 
words and motions, that they might anticipate my wishes and 
save me trouble ; but their civility was of an unpolished kind. 
I was frequently the subject of their discourse, and those that 
knew anything about me, either from the archbishop's letter or 



GOOD-NATURED HOSPITALITY. 261 

from my servants, communicated their knowledge aloud to 
every new-comer, as if I were deaf or did not understand their 
language. An old gentleman, the wit of the circle, put many 
questions to me, and in return acquainted me with the politics 
and scandal of the town. He was possessed of great cheerful- 
ness and native humour, but so totally ignorant of every thing 
and place beyond the limits of Sicily, that I never could make 
him comprehend where England is situated, or how circum- 
stanced with regard to its colonies, of which he has learned 
something from the gazettes. Finding my answers to his 
questions were incapable of conveying instruction, I gave 
myself no farther trouble, but suffered him without interruption 
to smoke his pipe, and in the intervals of his puffing to run on 
in a long string of stories, confounding times, names, places, 
and persons, in so ridiculous a manner, that the most inflexible 
features must have been betrayed into a smile : fortunately 
he took my laugh for a compliment, and joined very heartily 
in it." — Swinbukne's Travels in the Two Sicilies, vol. iii. 
p. 357. 



SPECIMEN OF HIGHER SOCIETY. 

" Wild honey is found in great abundance in these woods " 
(between Terranova and Calatagerone), " but the inhabitants 
have also hives near their houses ; its flavour is delicious, and 
has been celebrated from the remotest antiquity, for Hybla was 
situated in the centre of this country. Men may degenerate, 
may forget the arts by which they acquired renown ; manu- 
factures may fail, and commodities be debased ; but the sweets 
of the wild-flowers of the wilderness, the industry and natural 
mechanics of the bee, will continue without change or deroga- 
tion. From the quality of soil, and the want of water, this 



262 OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 

upper part of the province must always have had a great deal 
of waste land. 

" The corn wore the most promising appearance : the 
fallow land seemed to he excellent soil. Twenty-three pair 
of oxen were ploughing together within a square of thirty 
acres. 

" Beyond the town we entered a very fine tract of vineyards, 
which improved as we gradually approached the mountains of 
Calatagerone. 

" Calatagerone, a royal city, containing about 17,000 in- 
habitants, living by agriculture and the making of potter's 
ware, is twenty miles from the sea, and situated on the 
summit of a very high, insulated hill, embosomed in thick 
groves of cypresses; the road to it, though paved, is very 
steep, difficult, and dangerous for anything but a mule or an 
ass. I was conducted to the college of the late Jesuits ; and 
as the house was completely stripped of furniture, full of dirt 
and cobwebs, I apprehended my night's lodgings would be but 
indifferent. The servant belonging to the gentleman who has 
the management of this forfeited estate, and to whom I had 
brought a letter requesting a lodging in the college, perceiving 
the difficulties we lay under in making our settlement, ran 
home, and returned in a short time with a polite invitation to 
his master's house. There was no refusing such an offer, 
though I was far from expecting anything beyond a comfort- 
able apartment and homely fare in a family settled among the 
inland mountains of Sicily ; but, to my great surprise, I found 
the house of the Baron of Rosabia large, convenient, and fitted 
up in a modern taste with furniture that would be deemed 
elegant in any capital city in Europe. Everything suited this 
outward show, attendance, table, plate, and equipage. The 
baron and his lady having both travelled and seen a great deal 
of the world, had returned to settle in their native city, where 
they assured me I might find many families equally improved 
by an acquaintance with the manners of foreign countries, or 



SPECIMEN OF HIGHER SOCIETY. 263 

at least a frequentation of the best company in their own 
metropolis. Nothing could be more easy and polite than their 
address and conversation, and my astonishment was hourly in- 
creasing during my whole stay. After I had refreshed myself 
with a short but excellent meal, they took me out in a very 
handsome coach. It was a singular circumstance to meet a 
string of carriages full of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen on 
the summit of a mountain which no vehicle can ascend, unless 
it be previously taken to pieces and placed upon the back of 
mules. We seemed to be seated among the clouds. As the 
vast expanse of the hills and vales grew dim with the evening 
vapours, our parading resembled the amusements of the 
heathen gods in some poems and pictures, driving about 
Olympus, and looking down at the mortals below. 

" The hour of airing being expired, which consisted of six 
turns of about half a mile each, a numerous assembly was 
formed at the baron's house ; the manners of the company 
were extremely polished, and the French language familiar to 
the greatest part of it. When the card-tables were removed, a 
handsome supper, dressed by a French cook, was served up, 
with excellent foreign and Sicilian wines ; the conversation 
took a lively turn, and was well supported till midnight, 
when we all retired to rest. Calatagerone has several houses 
that live in the same elegant style, and its inhabitants have 
the reputation of being the politest people in the island." — 
Swinbukne's Travels, vol. iii. p. 337. 



POETICAL TURN OF THE SICILIANS. 

" Next to the lava-labours of iEtna, nothing has struck me 
more in this beautiful island than the poetical turn of the people. 
Theocritus was the father of Idylls ; and Virgil is always 
appealing to the ' Sicelides Musae.' I suspect the experience 



264 OVEEFLOWINGS OF THE JAR. 

detailed in his Georgics, his most perfect work, was most 
mainly drawn from hence. The words ' Calabri rapuere ' in 
the epitaph attributed to him for his own tomb, whether they 
were really his or no, prove, by inference, that he was close 
opposite this coast at the most observant period of life ; and no 
doubt he crossed over. Dante allows that the first Italian 
effusions in playful satire were termed ' Siciliani.' 'Even 
Petrarch savours of Trinacria. The speech of the inhabitants 
is to this day rather poetical than prosaic, abounding in lively 
images and picturesque modes of expression. The studied 
cringing so common in Naples is rare here : during a stay of 
six weeks in the island, I have only twice heard the title 
* Cellenza,' which is everlastingly ringing in your ears in the 
metropolis. Their similitudes are endless, and sometimes very 
striking. In Florence you will hear ' Bello come il campanile ' 
(' as handsome as the belfry,' — built by Giotto) : but here, if a 
lady is fair, she is ' una candela di cera ' (' a wax taper ') ; if too 
languid, ' ha un viso come un pesce bollito ' (' has a face like a 
boiled fish') ; gentlemen who sit sluggishly on their mules 
instead of springing off to aid the weaker sex up the hill, are 
designated as ' pezzi di lava ' (' lumps of lava '). If a little girl 
has anything remarkable about her, ' E molto simpatica, una 
cosa particolare ' (' She is very sympathetic ; — a special sort of 
thing '). ' Buscar qualche cosa' ('to look for something'), I am 
sorry to say, has here, as in Ischia, the double meaning, either 
to earn a carline or steal it, as the case may be. Their 
humour is never richer than when shown in describing their 
own peculiarities of character. — Notes from a Journal kept in 
Italy and Sicily, by J. F. Francis, B.A. 



( 265 ) 



A MEETING OF ENGLISH AND SICILIAN DISHES ON 
CHRISTMAS DAY. 

" We paid a visit to Messina a week ago, where we had the 
pleasure of being wind-bound on Christmas day. In merry 
England on Christmas day people eat roast beef and plum- 
pudding, turkeys and mince-pies. You may eat most of these 
here also, but the special dish in honour of the ' Nativita ' is 
capitoni, enormous eels, stewed in a rich sauce. Indeed there 
was an unusual supply, for a shipload of them, intended for the 
Naples market, could not leave port in time owing to the gale, 
and thus the speculator, a sea-captain, was fain to get rid of 
them in Messina at half-price. Now I can only say they are 
very good ; but we took the precaution of having another 
string to our bow, in shape of a respectable roast joint of 
beef, and a real, good, English-looking plum-pudding. After 
that it is very hard if we are left for the year of grace 
' eighteen forty-six ' without Victoria's bonny face in our 
purse." — Francis' Notes, p. 240. 



THE END. 



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